Capture your first request

This walkthrough keeps traffic on your machine. You do not need to deploy the public relay.

1. Open the dashboard

In one terminal, start the desktop GUI:

wiretap gui

Use wiretap tui instead when you are working over SSH or installed a CLI-only build.

2. Start an intercepted shell

In another terminal:

wiretap intercept start

Wiretap starts a recording proxy on 127.0.0.1:8888 and opens a child shell with proxy and certificate settings scoped to that shell.

Note

Wiretap does not edit your shell startup files for this workflow. Leaving the child shell restores your previous environment and stops the proxy.

3. Make a request

Run this inside the intercepted shell:

curl https://httpbin.org/anything \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"hello":"wiretap"}'

Open Traffic in the dashboard. Select the new row to inspect its request and response headers, body, size, and timing.

4. Continue from the capture

Use Open in composer to load the request into an editable draft, or Export as code to generate curl, fetch, Python, Go, and other client snippets.

5. Stop interception

Exit the child shell:

exit

You can also run wiretap_stop_interception to restore the environment while leaving that child shell open.

Next, learn how interception and TLS trust work or add a request transform.