EndpointEra

EndpointEra is a modern, lightweight VS Code extension designed to seamlessly capture, inspect, and replay HTTP traffic to your local backend API during development.

🚀 Supercharge your workflow: EndpointEra brings the power of Postman, Thunder Client, and HTTP Toolkit directly into your VS Code environment, combining them with automatic pytest generation and OpenAPI validation!

Key Features

• The Managed Gateway: Automatically proxies your traffic to record requests and responses without requiring you to write any network interception code. It binds directly to your normal development port (e.g., 8000), so you don't even have to change your frontend API URLs!
• Persistent API History: Records your API history persistently to .endpointera/traffic.jsonl, keeping a living behavioral timeline across editor restarts.

Traffic privacy: EndpointEra masks common credential fields in headers, query parameters, and JSON bodies before saving new captures. You can extend masking with the redaction settings below. Redaction is best effort. Stored history is scrubbed on activation and when redaction settings change. Run EndpointEra: Redact Stored History to scrub it manually. Unreadable records are discarded and reported; external exports and backups must be reviewed separately. Keep .endpointera/ out of source control, inspect exports before sharing them, and use the Environments tab for credentials stored in VS Code SecretStorage.

• Smart Endpoint Grouping: Intelligently groups dynamic URLs (like /users/5) into normalized endpoints (like /users/{id}) so you can track the health of an entire route.

• API Coverage & Progress Dashboard: A dedicated Coverage tab that parses your openapi.json contract and displays a beautiful, living progress bar. It constantly cross-references your live traffic against your documentation to track exactly which endpoints and expected status codes have been tested, telling you exactly when your API is 100% complete!

• The Regression Engine: The core magic of the extension. It automatically monitors the history of every endpoint and highlights when a previously successful request starts failing.

• OpenAPI Intelligence: Actively polls your local openapi.json contract. It analyzes incoming traffic and instantly alerts you of "Contract Drift" if your API returns a status code or a JSON field that isn't documented in your OpenAPI spec.

• Mocking Engine: Set up intercept rules to return custom JSON payloads, status codes, and even simulated network latency for any endpoint. Test edge cases, loading states, and 500 errors instantly from the "Mocks" tab without writing a single line of backend code.

• Environment Variables & Auth Injection: Define global headers (like Bearer tokens or API keys) from the "Environments" tab and have them automatically injected into all incoming and replayed requests on-the-fly.

• Comparison Engine & Request Details: View detailed side-by-side diffs showing exactly what changed (Status, Speed, URL, JSON Body) when a regression occurs.

• Fully Responsive UI: The dashboard fluidly adapts to any window size. Tables scroll horizontally and sidebars stack gracefully, allowing you to debug APIs comfortably even when tiled next to a code editor.

• Deep Editor Integration: Floating "CodeLens" buttons automatically appear above your FastAPI/Flask routes. Click them to instantly open the EndpointEra dashboard pre-filtered to that specific route! Control the recording proxy directly from the VS Code Status Bar.

• Native VS Code Styling: Fully respects your active VS Code theme (Dark, Light, or High Contrast) utilizing native UI Toolkits and official Microsoft @vscode/codicons.

• Replay & Verify Fix: Edit and replay a failed request directly from the dashboard to verify if your code changes fixed the issue, without ever leaving VS Code.

• Testing System: Save any recorded request as a reusable Test Case. Add visual JSON assertions (e.g. status == 200, body.user.role == "admin") and run the tests seamlessly with one click.

• Automatic Pytest Suite Generation: Highlight an endpoint, click Generate Pytest, and instantly receive a boilerplate test_api.py loaded with the exact payloads, headers, and response assertions derived from your traffic.

• 1-Click Code Snippets: Instantly copy any recorded request as a ready-to-run cURL command, JavaScript fetch() snippet, or Python (requests) script directly to your clipboard.

• Smart Contract Drift Analysis: Compares live traffic against your OpenAPI contract. Immediately spots missing parameters, wrong data types, or undocumented status codes.

• History Performance: Uses asynchronous file streaming, body stripping, detail loading, storage pagination and filtering, debounced search, and log trimming above approximately 50 MB. Known-good updates append to traffic.flags.jsonl without rewriting captures; keep this metadata file alongside traffic.jsonl when moving history. Retention reads only the final 20 MB. See Release Status for the local 20,000-record benchmark. JSON, CSV, and HAR exports stream from storage. Analytics and workbook exports still load records when requested; pages scan the log and retain only the requested prefix. Performance depends on record size and hardware.

• Deep Historical Context: See the "lifetime history" of an endpoint. Understand if it’s currently on a failing streak, what the most common failure signatures are, and trace issues across Git commits. Every recorded request seamlessly captures the exact Git Branch and Commit ID it was observed on. Regressions clearly display "First failure observed on revision X", helping you pinpoint exactly when a bug was introduced!

• Failure Intelligence: Automatically extracts failure signatures (like "KeyError: 'user'" or "422 Unprocessable Entity") from error responses and groups failures by their root cause.

• Advanced Performance Analytics Dashboard: Integrated visualization engine using Recharts. Monitor latency trends dynamically with time-series line charts and spot bottlenecks using the auto-calculated Slowest Endpoints leaderboard bar chart.

• Documentation Workbook Export: Export traffic into a multi-sheet .xlsx workbook covering endpoints, parameters, schemas, contracts, executions, history, regressions, and failures. Review report completeness against your own documentation requirements before sharing.

• HAR Network Import & Export: Full support for .har (HTTP Archive) files. Import sessions from external tools like Chrome DevTools or Postman to instantly leverage EndpointEra's regression tracking, or export your local traffic out to a HAR file to share with teammates.

• Postman Collection Export: One-click generation of a flawless Postman Collection (v2.1.0) containing your grouped API history, fully ready for QA handover or external sharing.

• Visual Request Flow Diagrams: The Flows tab groups requests by activity and renders client/API sequence diagrams with SVG and PNG export.

How to Use

1. Open your project in VS Code.
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + P to open the Command Palette.
3. Type and select EndpointEra: Run & Record API.
4. The extension will ask for your backend startup command (e.g. uvicorn main:app --reload --port 8000).
5. The EndpointEra Dashboard will open. The Managed Gateway will automatically start on your requested port (8000), quietly shifting your real backend to a hidden internal port.
6. Use your frontend, Postman, or Swagger exactly as you normally would. EndpointEra will seamlessly capture, analyze, and display all the traffic!

Extension Settings

You can customize the extension via Settings -> Extensions -> EndpointEra:

• Target Url: The URL of your local backend (default: http://127.0.0.1:8000).
• Proxy Port: (Legacy mode) The port the EndpointEra proxy should listen on if not using the Managed Gateway.
• Redaction Additional Keys: Exact JSON, header, or query key names to mask, such as tenantSecret.
• Redaction Key Patterns: Regular expressions for key names, such as private[_-]?key (JavaScript regular expression syntax; matching is case insensitive).
• Redaction Value Patterns: Regular expressions for sensitive text values, such as sk_[A-Za-z0-9]+. A value containing a match is masked in new captures and exports.

Patterns are case insensitive. Invalid patterns and patterns longer than 128 characters are ignored. With value patterns configured, text values longer than 65,536 characters are masked in full.

Development and release

Run npm ci and npm test from the repository root. Install frontend dependencies with npm --prefix webview-ui ci, then run npm run vscode:prepublish to compile, bundle, and build the dashboard.

See Release Status for verification evidence, Release Checklist for publishing steps, and Changelog for recent changes.

Replay and workbook behavior

Replay has a 30-second limit and a cancellable notification. Redirect responses are captured without following their destinations. Workbook outcomes honor expected status codes and assertion failures consistently. Parameters and payload fields are derived from observed traffic and available OpenAPI declarations; observations alone do not establish required fields or complete schema coverage. Invalid redaction patterns are reported, and masking covers form bodies, serialized JSON, repeated query values, and URL fragments.