Developer Tools

Document updated on Nov 2, 2018

There are some resources that make your life easier when developing with KrakenD. These tools are meant to be used only in development and never in production

Hot reload the configuration

A Docker image using Reflex watches the configuration directory and reloads KrakenD when the configuration changes. This is very convenient while you are developing as it allows you to test new changes without having to restart manually and making the process less tedious.

More information in our blog post

Generate graphs from configuration

The config2dot is a tool to create graphs automatically after reading your configuration file krakend.json.

Debugging the activity

krakend-memviz

Adds a DOT file exporter of request/response snapshots to your proxy stack for debug and development purposes. Do not use this in production as it will kill your performance.

krakend-spew

Dumps every entity seen in the pipe: requests and responses passing through thew whole stack. Do not use this in production as it will kill your performance.

Dumps are stored in files like <pipe>_<base64_endpoint/backend_name>_<timestamp>.txt. E.g:

$ ls
2,0K 25 sep 19:12 backend_L3VzZXJzL3t7Lk5pY2t9fQ==_1537895547814979000.txt
1,8K 25 sep 19:12 backend_LzIuMC91c2Vycy97ey5OaWNrfX0=_1537895547800941000.txt
92K 25 sep 19:12 client_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuYml0YnVja2V0Lm9yZy8yLjAvdXNlcnMva3BhY2hh_1537895547798571000.txt
92K 25 sep 19:12 client_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuYml0YnVja2V0Lm9yZy8yLjAvdXNlcnMva3BhY2hh_1537895547800824000.txt
104K 25 sep 19:12 client_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuZ2l0aHViLmNvbS91c2Vycy9rcGFjaGE=_1537895547814647000.txt
1,9K 25 sep 19:12 client_basic_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuYml0YnVja2V0Lm9yZy8yLjAvdXNlcnMva3BhY2hh_1537895547796264000.txt
1,9K 25 sep 19:12 client_basic_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuYml0YnVja2V0Lm9yZy8yLjAvdXNlcnMva3BhY2hh_1537895547798755000.txt
2,7K 25 sep 19:12 client_basic_aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGkuZ2l0aHViLmNvbS91c2Vycy9rcGFjaGE=_1537895547812621000.txt
2,3K 25 sep 19:12 proxy_L25pY2svOm5pY2s=_1537895547815244000.txt
66K 25 sep 19:12 router_L25pY2sva3BhY2hh_1537895547816402000.txt