Localhost HTTP Debugging With Fiddler

If you are doing much development and need to intercept HTTP traffic then Fiddler is the tool design for just this. I use Fiddler almost every day during a number of development tasks. It’s a great HTTP debugging proxy.

There is however one slight flaw with this awesome debugging proxy, if cannot debug LOCALHOST or 127.0.0.1. Now while this might sound bad, there are ways to work around this. Nick Berardi’s has provided some information on one way to work around this.

I don’t know if many of you are aware but the website http://www.somesite.com points to 127.0.0.1 as a standard for URL examples.

So if somesite.com points to the same local IP address as localhost, I figured that I could just use somesite.com instead of localhost in my projects.

This is pretty cool. How many people out there knows that if you ping www.somesite.com you get 127.0.0.1?

Making that slight change will allow Fiddler to intercept the traffic for those domains. While you can use LOCALHOST. this does not allows work.