RED is a robot that checks HTTP resources to see how they'll behave, pointing out common problems and suggesting improvements. Although it is not a HTTP conformance tester, it can find a number of HTTP-related issues.
using RED
What does RED do?
RED interacts with the resource at the provided URL to check for a large number of common HTTP problems, including:
- Invalid syntax in headers
- Ill-formed messages (e.g., bad chunking, incorrect content-length)
- Incorrect gzip encoding
- Missing headers
Additionally, it will tell how well your resource supports a number of HTTP features, like:
- Caching
- Negotiation for compression
- Last-Modified and ETag validation
- Partial content
See the source (available from the project page) for more details; RED's capabilities are added to all of the time.
What am I allowed to use RED for?
RED may be used to check your resources as well as those owned by others. However, please refrain from creating abusive amounts of traffic; e.g., repeatedly checking the same resource. All requests are logged.
This service may not be framed, scraped or otherwise repurposed. Automated queries (e.g., from a script) are not allowed. The software behind RED can be downloaded, deployed and reused, as long as the license terms are met; see the RED project page for more information.
Does RED support HTTPS URLs?
At this time, RED only supports HTTP.
How do I run RED on private servers (e.g., behind a firewall)?
You can download it from the RED project page to run locally.
reporting problems
If you believe RED's output is incorrect, please raise a detailed issue on the RED project page.
If you are a Webmaster and don't want this service to be able to access your pages, please contact us.
Other discussion can occur on the redbot-users mailing list; see the RED project page.
contributing to RED
RED is an Open Source project, licensed under MIT terms and written in Python. We welcome contributions; see the RED project page for more information.