Charles Proxy Automation

charles-command-line-options.md

Charles command-line options

Charles supports a few command line options out of the box, documented here.
Unfortunately they seem to operate only as parameters for new Charles sessions, so you won't be able to run commands on a running instance of Charles.

Start a specific Charles session

A Charles session contains all of your recorded information. It is represented by the Session window; by default a new session is automatically created when you start Charles.
Sessions can be saved from File → Save Session (⌘+S).
Once saved, if you want you can start Charles from the saved session by running:

/Applications/Charles.app/Contents/MacOS/Charles YOUR_SAVED_SESSION_PATH

Start Charles with a specific configuration

This part is not well documented, so I had to dig a bit in the settings to understand how it works.
By default Charles stores its configuration in /Users/YOUR_USER/Library/Preferences/com.xk72.Charles.config, a readable xml file that contains all the Charles settings.
If needed, you can copy this file to another location, tweak the settings your interested into and start Charles directly from it:

/Applications/Charles.app/Contents/MacOS/Charles -config YOUR_CONFIG_PATH

Please notice that you can manually edit the configuration file only if Charles it not running.

Start Charles with throttling enabled

Easy peasy:

/Applications/Charles.app/Contents/MacOS/Charles -throttling

Start Charles in headless mode

You can run Charles in headless mode, so that no UI will be presented, but it will still proxy content.

/Applications/Charles.app/Contents/MacOS/Charles -headless

How can you control Charles in headless mode? You can use its Web Interface.

charles-web-interface.md

Charles Web Interface and Web Services

Charles has a web interface that enables you to control Charles from a browser, or using an external program using the web interface as a web service.

The web interface can be enabled Proxy → Web Interface Settings. You can allow anonymous access or you can configure usernames and passwords. You can access the web interface by visiting http://control.charles/ in a web browser configured to use Charles as its proxy.

The web interface itself is a nice addition, but for my use case the most interesting part of it is that it exposes a few endpoints that can be use to programmatically change the configuration of a running instance of Charles.

They're not documented, but, as suggested from the the official website, I was able to extract them from the web interface.

Assuming that:

• 192.168.1.41 is the IP address of your Mac
• Charles is using the port 8888 (its default one)

You can invoke a command with cURL in this way:

curl -v -x http://192.168.1.41:8888 http://control.charles/YOUR_COMMAND

Available commands

Throttling commands

• /throttling/deactivate
• /throttling/activate: Enable the last used throttling preset.
• /throttling/activate?preset=YOUR_PRESET: Enable throttling with one of these specific:
  • 56+kbps+Modem: 56 kbps Modem
  • 256+kbps+ISDN%2FDSL: 256 kbps ISDN/DSL
  • 512+kbps+ISDN%2FDSL: 512 kbps ISDN/DSL
  • 2+Mbps+ADSL: 2 Mbps ADSL
  • 8+Mbps+ADSL2: 8 Mbps ADSL2
  • 16+Mbps+ADSL2%2B: 16 Mbps ADSL2+
  • 32+Mbps+VDSL: 32 Mbps VDSL
  • 32+Mbps+Fibre: 32 Mbps Fibre
  • 100+Mbps+Fibre: 100 Mbps Fibre
  • 3G: 3G
  • 4G: 4g

Recording commands

• /recording/start
• /recording/stop

Tools commands

• /tools/breakpoints/enable
• /tools/breakpoints/disable
• /tools/no-caching/enable
• /tools/no-caching/disable
• /tools/block-cookies/enable
• /tools/block-cookies/disable
• /tools/map-remote/enable
• /tools/map-remote/disable
• /tools/map-local/enable
• /tools/map-local/disable
• /tools/rewrite/enable
• /tools/rewrite/disable
• /tools/black-list/enable
• /tools/black-list/disable
• /tools/white-list/enable
• /tools/white-list/disable
• /tools/dns-spoofing/enable
• /tools/dns-spoofing/disable
• /tools/auto-save/enable
• /tools/auto-save/disable
• /tools/client-process/enable
• /tools/client-process/disable

Getting a setting status

Using the same pattern shown above you can also get the status of a specific setting (enabled/disabled).
Unfortunately it involves parsing the HTML output of the web interface but from my testing it seems to be working consistently:

Supposing you want to get the rewrite setting status you can run:

curl -v -x http://192.168.1.41:8888 http://control.charles/tools/rewrite/

It will give you the following HTML:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Charles Web Interface</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="../../css/plain.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Charles Web Interface</h1>
    <h2>Rewrite</h2>
    <p>Status: Enabled</p>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="enable">Enable</a></li>
      <li><a href="disable">Disable</a></li>
      <li><a href="../">Back</a></li>
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>

If you look carefully you can easily spot the status, which appears always in the following way:

<p>Status: STATUS</p>

Thanks for the write up! Wanted to add a quick comment:

Assuming that 192.168.1.41 is the IP address of your Mac.

To get the ip address of your mac, you can try either:
ipconfig getifaddr en0 or ipconfig getifaddr en1 in your terminal.

Thanks a lot for putting this together, I am looking for some options to make changes to the blocklist, rewrite etc..
So that in real-time I would be able to control what exact endpoints we need to block/rewrite & with what details.

Thanks in advanced !

If I want to use this command /tools/map-local/enable, how do I point to a local file programmatically in an automated test ?

Thanks

Out of curiosity, did Charles ever introduce the functionality for the suggested "reload settings command to the control API" as per the tweet from 2019?

once I did started the charles through the command:
curl -v -x http://192.168.1.41:8888 http://control.charles/recording/start
is there any option inspect the http request/response data?
I need to use it for automation on mobile devices

otherwise, is there any api with Java that interfaces with the charles command line and can do automated tests on it?