sidewire

Sidewire

Chrome extension that logs network requests in a side panel — without opening DevTools.

Install (dev)

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode (top right)
3. Click Load unpacked → select this folder
4. Pin the extension, click its icon to open the side panel

Features

• Capture in active tab (default) or all tabs, pause/resume, clear (preserves starred entries)
• Filters: URL (substring or /regex/), HTTP method, resource type, status bucket (2xx/3xx/4xx/5xx/errors), domain dropdown auto-populated from captured hosts, “★ only” toggle
• Slow-request highlight with configurable threshold (orange accent)
• Star entries (☆/★) — kept across Clear
• GraphQL operationName auto-extracted from POST bodies, shown as a purple badge in the row
• Click row → expand details: query params, request/response headers (parsed), request body (formData or raw, JSON pretty-printed), response body (when capture enabled), timing breakdown
• Click URL → copies URL to clipboard
• Per-section copy buttons + Copy URL / Copy as cURL / Copy as fetch
• Copy URLs → copies all visible (filtered) URLs
• HAR export → downloads visible entries as .har (openable in DevTools, Postman, Insomnia, …)
• Replay → re-fires captured request with the same headers/body and shows the new response inline
• Replay with… → opens an inline editor: toggle/edit/add query parameters, edit the body (with JSON pretty-print) before re-firing
• Decode base64 button on base64-encoded response bodies (one click → readable text, JSON auto pretty-printed)
• JWT decoding (opt-in toggle) — auto-shows decoded header + payload JSON under any JWT-shaped header value (works for Authorization: Bearer … and similar)
• Light / dark theme — toggle in the title bar, follows OS preference by default, persisted across sessions
• Response body capture (toggle) — attaches chrome.debugger to the active tab. Chrome shows its built-in debugger notification bar on the inspected tab while attached.
• Persistence — buffer kept in chrome.storage.session, survives service worker restarts
• Hotkeys: / focus URL filter, Esc clear filter, p pause/resume

Limitations

• Response bodies require the chrome.debugger toggle (Chrome’s built-in debugger notification bar will appear on the inspected tab while attached). Correlation between webRequest and CDP is by URL match, so identical concurrent requests may have their bodies attached to the wrong entry.
• Replay runs from the extension origin; some headers (Cookie, Origin, Host, Referer, …) are forbidden by the fetch spec and silently dropped.
• Buffer capped at 2000 entries; oldest non-starred dropped first.
• chrome.storage.session quota is ~10MB; very large response bodies may cause persistence to fail silently.