Network Debugging

Chute is a proxy, but the reason to run one on your own devices is usually not routing. It is that every request now passes through a place you control — so you can watch what an app actually sends, keep the bodies and read them afterwards, change a request or a response while it is in flight, and make a healthy backend look broken to see what your app does about it.

The reference pages for each mechanism are elsewhere in this manual: HTTPS Decryption, Mock Response, URL Rewrite, JS Scripting. This section puts them in the order you actually use them, and says what changes from platform to platform.

Four surfaces onto the same kernel

One running Chute; four ways to look at it. Picking the wrong one is the usual reason something "isn't there".

The console and Dashboard overlap heavily and are reached differently — the console is served by the kernel and opened in a browser, Dashboard is a Mac application talking a binary channel. Neither is a superset of the other; What Dashboard cannot reach lists the differences.

Four switches to get right first

Nearly every "I see the connection but not the request" ends at one of these four, in this order:

1. The traffic reaches Chute at all. A row in the traffic view is the proof. Nothing at all is a takeover problem, not a debugging one — see Troubleshooting.
2. The CA is installed and trusted. Two separate steps on iOS, one on macOS, and neither of them on tvOS — see Installing and trusting the CA certificate.
3. The host is on the MitM list. Chute decrypts declared hosts and nothing else. A row that says CONNECT with no method and no status was never decrypted.
4. Recording is on. replica = true, or the switch (Traffic Capture on Mac, Dump Data on iOS and tvOS). Without it every row still carries its rule, policy and timings — only the payloads are missing. [Replica] then narrows what is kept.

Switches 3 and 4 are also togglable at runtime from the console, from Dashboard and over the API, and none of those writes anything back to the configuration file: after a restart the file wins.

What each platform gives you

Where to go from here

• Debugging an iPhone from a Mac — the whole path end to end, from a fresh phone to a decrypted body on a Mac screen.
• Debugging on a Mac — the Mac's own traffic, including terminal tools and per-process isolation.
• Debugging an Apple TV — a device with no browser, no share sheet, and no way to install a certificate by itself.
• Replica — which connections keep their bodies, and how to stop capturing everything.
• Mocking and Fault Injection — canned responses, error statuses, injected latency, and what Chute genuinely cannot simulate.

When the answer is "it doesn't work" rather than "what is it doing", start at Troubleshooting instead — in particular Why doesn't my rewrite do anything?, which is the question this section produces most often.