Proxy / cache server for development purposes

Question

I'm working on a mobile client. Dev backend server, I'm working with, isn't stable at all. It may be unusable for a full working day. Prod server is a bit better but still sometimes it doesn't work either. The other problem is it's much more difficult to use it in development. Besides that it's completely wrong to work like that. Basically these servers have been made for web, not for mobile. And it has other strange and annoying thing that destructs me from my primary work - token life time is only 60 seconds. That means if the app didn't refresh the token in that period the token dies. And next time you run the app you need to authorize from scratch. And that process takes centuries(((. May be I just don't understand how it works or something, but as I see web site just spams the sever every minute.

I was thinking how to fix this problem and started using mocking manually. But it's very annoying and time consuming either. The other idea is to use some kind of proxy / cache server that will send request to original server and if it fails return cached data. It seems that it may help in my situation. I'm not sure would such proxy / cache server be able to eliminate token problem. Basically I need to refresh it as soon as first token has been received. But who knows? May be I'm lucky enough?)

So the question: is there some simple to use proxy cache server that I will be able to run locally to achieve what I want?

The other opportunity is to write such proxy server myself. I have no experience in writing servers at all. But as a last chance I could try. The benefit of writing proxy server myself is that I should be able to "fix" token problem for sure. But I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

So any help and thoughts are appreciated.

Answer 1

Not entirely sure if this will solve your problem but let's give it a shot.

I myself have been programming against a rate-limited API. During development I often max out the allowed requests and have to wait before I could continue. I have developed a small caching proxy server that sits between your client and the server. It intercepts the requests and puts both the request and response in it's cache. Whenever it intercepts a request that it's already seen it will respond from cache without forwarding the request to the target server.

I'm not sure what your requests look like. The proxy that I build currently retrieves cache based on URL and HTTP Method, so that may or may not be what you need.

Here's the link to the GitHub repository: https://github.com/RobinvandenHurk/cache-proxy

Disclaimer: For if it wasn't clear, I am the author of this proxy