Running as a browser proxy with multiple hosts - intended use case?

[John Hovell]

What is the use case for the --enable-browser-proxying option from the standalone JAR? The documentation seems light "This supports a website based variant of the proxy/intercept pattern described above, allowing you to modify specific AJAX requests or swap out CSS/Javascript files."

I think I hoped it that if I set up my app to use Wiremock as a web proxy, I could mock several 3rd party services using a single Wiremock instance making use of the host header, but so far I have not been able to make Wiremock return anything other than a 404 & it is unclear to me whether this option can be used with --record-mappings or --proxy-all (which seems to only support a single mocked service). 

I have investigated Mock-Server.com which seems to support this use case well with a Maven plugin and a SOCKS and web proxy mode. However, I think Wiremock's support for record and playback and storing request bodies as separate files is much stronger than mock server so I'd like to use Wiremock if it can support my use case.

Since my project is built using Maven & tested with Cargo, I have experimented building my own Maven plugin for Wiremock, mostly to manage the N daemons of wiremock for the various services I need to mock. Another good reason to go with a web or SOCK proxy solution is for certain libraries such as Amazon's S3 SDK, mocking seems to be very challenging even for a single HTTP GET, due to the combination of HTTPS, number of different 302's and hosts/domains contacted, certs with wildcards, and thus no good way to replace Amazon's hostnames with localhost + custom port.

Does Wiremock support my use case? Is there another project that might do something closer to what I am looking for? Mock-server seems like it could work, but the record and playback functionality & storage seems like an afterthought and require lots of custom Java code. My eventual goal is to be able to periodically programmatically check my real 3rd party services for updates and then update my integration test suite as needed, possibly just using the configuration of the library + maven without resorting to writing test-specific Java stubbing.

Cheers,
John

[Tom Akehurst]

--enable-browser-proxying really just means "act as a forward proxy". The target service is whatever your browser asked for.

However, WireMock can reverse proxy to different destinations on a per-stub basis. So you could configure e.g. 3 stubs matching on different host headers targetting different back ends.