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+{% extends "frame.html" %}
+{% block body %}
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>
+ pathod
+ <small>A pathological web daemon.</small>
+ </h1>
+</div>
+
+At pathod's heart is a small, terse language for crafting HTTP responses,
+designed to be easy to specify in a request URL. The simplest way to use
+pathod is to fire up the daemon, and specify the response behaviour you
+want using this language in the request URL. Here's a minimal example:
+
+ http://localhost:9999/p/200
+
+Everything after the "/p/" path component is a response specifier - in this
+case just a vanilla 200 OK response. See the docs below to get (much) fancier.
+You can also add anchors to the pathod server that serve a fixed response
+whenever a matching URL is requested:
+
+ pathod -a "/foo=200"
+
+Here, "/foo" a regex specifying the anchor path, and the part after the "=" is
+a response specifier.
+
+pathod also has a nifty built-in web interface, which lets you play with
+the language by previewing responses, exposes activity logs, online help and
+various other goodies. Try it by visiting the server root:
+
+ http://localhost:9999
+
+
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Specifying Responses</h1>
+</div>
+
+The general form of a response is as follows:
+
+ code[MESSAGE]:[colon-separated list of features]
+
+Here's the simplest possible response specification, returning just an HTTP 200
+OK message with no headers and no content:
+
+ 200
+
+We can embellish this a bit by specifying an optional custom HTTP response
+message (if we don't, pathod automatically creates an appropriate one). By
+default for a 200 response code the message is "OK", but we can change it like
+this:
+
+ 200"YAY"
+
+The quoted string here is an example of a <a href=#valuespec>Value
+Specifier</a>, a syntax that is used throughout the pathod response
+specification language. In this case, the quotes mean we're specifying a
+literal string, but there are many other fun things we can do. For example, we
+can tell pathod to generate 100k of random ASCII letters instead:
+
+ 200@100k,ascii_letters
+
+Full documentation on the value specification syntax can be found in the next
+section.
+
+Following the response code specifier is a colon-separated list of features.
+For instance, this specifies a response with a body consisting of 1 megabyte of
+random data:
+
+ 200:b@1m
+
+And this is the same response with an ETag header added:
+
+ 200:b@1m:h"Etag"="foo"
+
+Both the header name and the header value are full value specifiers. Here's the
+same response again, but with a 1k randomly generated header name:
+
+ 200:b@1m:h@1k,ascii_letters="foo"
+
+A few specific headers have shortcuts, because they're used so often. The
+shortcut for the content-type header is "c":
+
+ 200:b@1m:c"text/json"
+
+That's it for the basic response definition. Now we can start mucking with the
+responses to break clients. One common hard-to-test circumstance is hangs or
+slow responses. pathod has a pause operator that you can use to define
+precisely when and how long the server should hang. Here, for instance, we hang
+for 120 seconds after sending 50 bytes (counted from the first byte of the HTTP
+response):
+
+ 200:b@1m:p120,50
+
+If that's not long enough, we can tell pathod to hang forever:
+
+ 200:b@1m:p120,f
+
+Or to send all data, and then hang without disconnecting:
+
+ 200:b@1m:p120,a
+
+We can also ask pathod to hang randomly:
+
+ 200:b@1m:pr,a
+
+There is a similar mechanism for dropping connections mid-response. So, we can
+tell pathod to disconnect after sending 50 bytes:
+
+ 200:b@1m:d50
+
+Or randomly:
+
+ 200:b@1m:dr
+
+All of these features can be combined. Here's a response that pauses twice,
+once at 10 bytes and once at 20, then disconnects at 5000:
+
+ 200:b@1m:p10,10:p20,10:d5000
+
+
+## Response Features
+
+<table class="table table-bordered table-condensed">
+ <tbody >
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ hKEY=VALUE
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Set a header. Both KEY and VALUE are full <a href=#valuespec>Value Specifiers</a>.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ bVALUE
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Set the body. VALUE is a <a href=#valuespec>Value
+ Specifier</a>. When the body is set, pathod will
+ automatically set the appropriate Content-Length header.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ cVALUE
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ A shortcut for setting the Content-Type header. Equivalent to:
+
+ <pre>h"Content-Type"=VALUE</pre>
+
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ lVALUE
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ A shortcut for setting the Location header. Equivalent to:
+
+ <pre>h"Content-Type"=VALUE</pre>
+
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+
+
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ dOFFSET
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Disconnect after OFFSET bytes. The offset can also be "r", in which case pathod
+ will disconnect at a random point in the response.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ pSECONDS,OFFSET
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Pause for SECONDS seconds after OFFSET bytes. SECONDS can also be "f" to pause
+ forever. OFFSET can also be "r" to generate a random offset, or "a" for an
+ offset just after all data has been sent.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+</table>
+
+<a id="valuespec"></a>
+## VALUE Specifiers
+
+There are three different flavours of value specification.
+
+### Literal
+
+Literal values are specified as a quoted strings:
+
+ "foo"
+
+Either single or double quotes are accepted, and quotes can be escaped with
+backslashes within the string:
+
+ 'fo\'o'
+
+
+### Files
+
+You can load a value from a specified file path. To do so, you have to specify
+a _staticdir_ option to pathod on the command-line, like so:
+
+ pathod -d ~/myassets
+
+All paths are relative paths under this directory. File loads are indicated by
+starting the value specifier with the left angle bracket:
+
+ <my/path
+
+The path value can also be a quoted string, with the same syntax as literals:
+
+ <"my/path"
+
+
+### Generated values
+
+An @-symbol lead-in specifies that generated data should be used. There are two
+components to a generator specification - a size, and a data type. By default
+pathod assumes a data type of "bytes".
+
+Here's a value specifier for generating 100 bytes:
+
+ @100
+
+You can use standard suffixes to indicate larger values. Here, for instance, is
+a specifier for generating 100 megabytes:
+
+ @100m
+
+Data is generated and served efficiently - if you really want to send a
+terabyte of data to a client, pathod can do it. The supported suffixes are:
+
+
+<table class="table table-bordered table-condensed">
+ <tbody >
+ <tr>
+ <td>b</td> <td>1024**0 (bytes)</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>k</td> <td>1024**1 (kilobytes)</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>m</td> <td>1024**2 (megabytes)</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>g</td> <td>1024**3 (gigabytes)</td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>t</td> <td>1024**4 (terabytes)</td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+</table>
+
+Data types are separated from the size specification by a comma. This
+specification generates 100mb of ASCII:
+
+ @100m,ascii
+
+Supported data types are:
+
+
+- ascii_letters
+- ascii_lowercase
+- ascii_uppercase
+- digits
+- hexdigits
+- letters
+- lowercase
+- octdigits
+- printable
+- punctuation
+- uppercase
+- whitespace
+- ascii
+- bytes
+
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>API</h1>
+</div>
+
+pathod exposes a simple API, intended to make it possible to drive and
+inspect the daemon remotely for use in unit testing and the like.
+
+
+<table class="table table-bordered table-condensed">
+ <tbody >
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ /api/clear_log
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ A POST to this URL clears the log buffer.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ /api/info
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Basic version and configuration info.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td>
+ /api/log
+ </td>
+ <td>
+ Returns the current log buffer. At the moment the buffer size is 500 entries -
+ when the log grows larger than this, older entries are discarded. The returned
+ data is a JSON dictionary, with the form:
+
+ <pre>{ 'log': [ ENTRIES ] } </pre>
+
+ You can preview the JSON data returned for a log entry through the built-in web
+ interface.
+ </td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+</table>
+
+<div class="page-header">
+ <h1>Error Responses</h1>
+</div>
+
+To let users distinguish crafted responses from internal pathod responses,
+pathod uses the non-standard 800 response code to indicate errors. For example,
+a request to:
+
+ http://localhost:9999/p/foo
+
+... will return an 800 response, because "foo" is not a valid page specifier.
+{% endblock %}