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webtrace

webtrace is a looking glass utility: a web frontend for traceroute, ping, and mtr. It uses readable streams to pipe live output straight to the browser.

Demo

Configuration

webtrace accepts some config options via environment variables:

  • WEBTRACE_MTRCOUNT - number of mtr cycles to run (default 10)
  • WEBTRACE_PINGCOUNT - number of pings to send in ping mode (default 4)
  • WEBTRACE_RATELIMIT - rate limit of calls per IP, via Flask-Limiter (default "10/minute")
  • WEBTRACE_SERVERINFO - optional server description to insert into the site
  • WEBTRACE_TITLE - web page title (default "webtrace")
  • WEBTRACE_TIMEOUT - timeout for requests in seconds (default 30)

Install

webtrace is a Flask app, and there are many ways to deploy them - below are some examples. The only requirement is a web server that supports streaming (i.e. with response buffering disabled).

webtrace's entrypoint is app:app.

Gunicorn (Linux)

To run webtrace with Gunicorn, you MUST enable asynchronous workers (gunicorn app:app -k gevent). Otherwise, only one request can be served at once, across the whole instance. For the rest, you can follow Gunicorn's official deployment guide.

There are some examples of systemd services to start webtrace in the deploy-examples/gunicorn folder.

Waitress (cross-platform)

webtrace works out of the box with Waitress. Although the Flask setup guide suggests that Waitress doesn't support streaming, this worked fine in my testing on both Linux and Windows.

Example: waitress-serve --host 127.0.0.1 app:app

Reverse proxy with nginx

A common recommendation is to run the WSGI server behind a reverse proxy. This works well with nginx: just make sure to set proxy_buffering off;

upstream webtrace-backend {
    server unix:/run/webtrace.sock;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    #listen 443 ssl;
    #listen [::]:443 ssl;

    server_name your.server.name;

    # Alternatively, "location /" if you want webtrace at the root of the domain
    location /webtrace/ {
        proxy_pass http://webtrace-backend/;
        # Important since we use HTTP streaming!
        proxy_buffering off;
        access_log /var/log/nginx/webtrace-access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/webtrace-error.log;
    }
}

IIS + wfastcgi (Windows)

(I ported webtrace to Windows mostly for proof-of-concept; this is not thoroughly supported. Last tested on Server 2019 and Python 3.12)

Muhammad Tauseeq's "Deploy a Flask app on Windows Server using FastCGI and IIS" guide covers pretty much everything. There is a sample web.config file in the deploy-examples/iis-wfastcgi folder; this should be copied into the folder you clone the webtrace repo into. responseBufferLimit="0" is important to turn off response buffering.

IIS has other ways of running CGI apps such as HttpPlatformHandler and ARR Reverse Proxying, but these do not appear to support unbuffered responses. As a result, webtrace will not work with those setups.