Prerequisites

A Mac running OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) or Linux (tested with Ubuntu Lucid). Support for Windows is still experimental
Python 2.6

Install

Only do this the first time.

Open the Terminal application and download the source.

$ git clone https://github.com/chromium/web-page-replay.git

Move to the newly created directory.

$ cd web-page-replay

Network simulation

For network simulation, you can use https://github.com/WPO-Foundation/tsproxy which works on most platforms. More realistic network simulation options can be achieved through using tools like dummynet, but those only support limited platforms.

Record

First you must record the web page or pages that you wish to replay.

Open the web browser you wish to use and clear its cache so that all resources will be requested from the network.
Switch to the Terminal application and start the program in record mode. All HTTP requests performed on the machine while it is running will be saved into the archive.

$ sudo ./replay.py --record ~/archive.wpr

Load the web page or pages in the open web browser. Be sure to wait until each is fully loaded.
Stop recording by killing the replay.py process with Ctrl+c. The archive will be saved to ~/archive.wpr.

Replay

After you have created an archive, you may later replay it at any time.

Start the program in replay mode with a previously recorded archive.

$ sudo ./replay.py ~/archive.wpr

Load recorded pages in a web browser. A 404 will be served for any pages or resources not in the recorded archive.
Stop replaying by killing the replay.py process with Ctrl+c.

Network simulation examples

During replay, you may simulate desired network conditions. This is useful for benchmarking.

128KByte/s uplink bandwidth, 4Mbps/s downlink bandwidth with 100ms RTT time

$ sudo ./replay.py --up 128KByte/s --down 4Mbit/s --delay_ms=100 archive.wpr

1% packet loss rate

$ sudo ./replay.py --packet_loss_rate=0.01 ~/archive.wpr

Using browser proxy settings

You may choose to disable the forwarding of DNS requests to the local replay server. If DNS request forwarding is disabled, an external mechanism must be used to forward traffic to the replay server.

Disable DNS forwarding

$ ./replay.py --no-dns_forwarding --record ~/archive.wpr

Forwarding traffic to replay server (via Google Chrome on linux)

Go to Chrome Preferences -> Under the Hood -> Change Proxy Settings
Under Manual Proxy configuration -> HTTP proxy, enter 127.0.0.1 for IP and the port that web page replay is configured to listen to (default 80).

Alternatively, traffic forwarding may also be configured via command line flags.

$ google-chrome --host-resolver-rules="MAP * 127.0.0.1:80,EXCLUDE localhost"

HTTPS/SSL support

By default, Web Page Replay, creates a self-signed certificate to serve SSL traffic. In order for it to work, browsers need to be configured to ignore certificate errors. Be aware that doing so opens a giant security hole.

$ google-chrome --ignore-certificate-errors

Firefox has a configuration file for exceptions. That requires listing each host that gets used. If you have a better solution, please add it to the comments below. IE and Safari options are also needed.

To turn off SSL support, run replay.py with “--no-ssl”.

Troubleshooting

Permission errors

On Linux, either of the following two errors are permission problems:

python: can't open file './replay.py': [Errno 13] Permission denied

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./replay.py", line 50, in <module>
    import dnsproxy
  File "/home/slamm/p/wpr/dnsproxy.py", line 19, in <module>
    import platformsettings
ImportError: No module named platformsettings

This can happen if you checkout the files to an NFS directory. Either move the files to a local directory, or make them world readable/executable.

Unable to access auto mounted directories

WPR can cause autofs to hang. On Ubuntu, the following command fixes it:

$ sudo restart autofs

Help

For full usage instructions and advanced options, see the program's help.

$ ./replay.py --help