testserver

Test environment for Referer Modifier

The testserver is a Go module that provides a small test web server. It serves an overview of HTTP headers (including Referer) as well as a script that adds the Javascript document.referrer to the page.

Manually building the test server is only needed if you want to play with it directly, if you just want to run the automated tests bringing up the container based test environment is all you need.

Building and running the server

Simply build the Go module and run the binary:

go build
./testserver

This will start the server on port 8080, use the -port option to change the port. You can add links to other servers of the same kind by giving their base URLs as a comma separated list with the -links option, e.g.:

./testserver -links http://example.com:8080,http://example.net`

Note that the testserver expects to find the page.gohtml template and static/ directory in its working directory.

Container based test environment

To test handling of Referer headers with different rules one needs a bunch of servers with links between them. The dockerfiles and compose.yaml in this directory serve to set up such an environment.

There are two dockerfiles involved:

• Dockerfile sets up a container for the testserver binary with the required support files.
• proxy/Dockerfile is based on httpd:alpine and sets up an HTTP proxy that allows access to the .test domain.

The compose file combines them into a test environment: Two testserver containers that serve various subdomains of .test (one would work just as well, but it's more fun with two), and the HTTP proxy to access them without messing with your local DNS: Just tell your test browser to use the proxy, optionally use an add-on that can configure the proxy only for the .test domain (e.g. FoxyProxy). While the commands listed below use docker compose, they will work with podman-compose 1.0.6 (or newer) as well.

Build and start the test environment:

docker compose build
docker compose up -d

The proxy port is exposed at 127.0.0.1:8080. If you need a different port adjust the compose file as necessary. After configuring the proxy point your browser at http://www.x.test/. You can click around the different test domains and see how the Referer behaves.

When done, you can stop the test environment with:

docker compose down