DESCRIPTION

LWP::Debug is used to provide tracing facilities, but these are not used by LWP any more. The code in this module is kept around (undocumented) so that 3rd party code that happens to use the old interfaces continue to run.

One useful feature that LWP::Debug provided (in an imprecise and troublesome way) was network traffic monitoring. The following section provides some hints about recommended replacements.

Network traffic monitoring

The best way to monitor the network traffic that LWP generates is to use an external TCP monitoring program. The Wireshark program (<http://www.wireshark.org/>) is highly recommended for this.

Another approach it to use a debugging HTTP proxy server and make LWP direct all its traffic via this one. Call "$ua->proxy" to set it up and then just use LWP as before.

For less precise monitoring needs just setting up a few simple handlers might do. The following example sets up handlers to dump the request and response objects that pass through LWP:

  use LWP::UserAgent;
  $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
  $ua->default_header('Accept-Encoding' => scalar HTTP::Message::decodable());
  $ua->add_handler("request_send",  sub { shift->dump; return });
  $ua->add_handler("response_done", sub { shift->dump; return });
  $ua->get("http://www.example.com");