Debugging http Node.js server requests and responses from shell

Here is a cool tip to inspect Node.js running an http process / server. First off, we start a simple http server in Node.js like this:

const http = require('http');

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    res.end("
Why hello world!
\n");
});

server.listen(4242, () => {
    console.log("Server is running...");
});

This sets up a http server in Node.js. The http module is built-in in Node.js, we only have to require it (import in ES6). Now, just enter the following (I use Windows Subsystem for Linux - WSL in this case) in your shell to export NODE_DEBUG environment variable: export NODE_DEBUG=http We can now see requests and responses in our Node.js server! (Image below uses Wsl-Terminal as our terminal against WSL).