Debugging ring requests

Requests are Clojure hash-maps so are easy to extract data from in a meaningful way.

If getting unexpected results, checking the details received in the request is a fast way to diagnose issues by seeing the data. The ring/ring-devel library contains a handle-dump function which displays the request parameters in a web page.

Add ring development library

Add the ring/ring-devel library as a dependency which included functions for developing and debugging ring applications.

 :deps
 {org.clojure/clojure {:mvn/version "1.10.1"}

  http-kit  {:mvn/version "2.4.0-alpha6"}
  compojure {:mvn/version "1.6.1"}

  ring/ring-core  {:mvn/version "1.8.1"}
  ring/ring-devel {:mvn/version "1.8.1"}
  }

Ideally the ring/ring-devel library would be added as an alias in the projects deps.edn configuration file as these functions are useful for development time rather than runtime.

Require the ring.handler.dump namespace

Require the ring.handler.dump namespace in the ns form of practicalli.status-monitor-server namespace and refer the specific handle-dump function.

(ns practicalli.status-monitor-service
  (:gen-class)
  (:require
   [org.httpkit.server       :as    app-server]
   [compojure.core           :refer [defroutes GET]]
   [compojure.route          :refer [not-found]]
   [ring.handler.dump        :refer [handle-dump]]
   [ring.util.response       :refer [response]]
   [practicalli.helpers-http :refer [http-status-code]]))

Add a route to show the request map

Add a route that shows the request information using the handle-dump function.

(defroutes status-monitor
  (GET "/" [] {:status (:OK http-status-code) :body "Status Monitor Dashboard"})
  (GET "/request-dump" [] handle-dump))

(re)start the application server and visit the URL http://localhost:8080/request-dump

The request map details are also printed to the REPL buffer

{:remote-addr "127.0.0.1",
 :params {},
 :route-params {},
 :headers
 {"accept"
  "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8",
  "accept-encoding" "gzip, deflate",
  "accept-language" "en-US,en;q=0.5",
  "connection" "keep-alive",
  "cookie"
  "_ga=GA1.1.1141619352.1582159249; ring-session=0b3dc210-278e-4011-bc03-d8c2292b2c17; JSESSIONID=5RNNitzOTyNL6KRnC6umjfPcQCmFmZVviUfCLybB; _gid=GA1.1.671770139.1594216837",
  "host" "localhost:8080",
  "upgrade-insecure-requests" "1",
  "user-agent"
  "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"},
 :async-channel
 #object[org.httpkit.server.AsyncChannel 0x359a37c8 "/127.0.0.1:8080<->/127.0.0.1:38190"],
 :server-port 8080,
 :content-length 0,
 :compojure/route [:get "/request-dump"],
 :websocket? false,
 :content-type nil,
 :character-encoding "utf8",
 :uri "/request-dump",
 :server-name "localhost",
 :query-string nil,
 :body nil,
 :scheme :http,
 :request-method :get}