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Mirror Tool

The Mirror tool saves responses to disk as they are received, creating a mirror copy of websites as you browse them.

The responses are saved in the same directory structure as the website, with a root directory created for the hostname. File names are derived from the URL and converted to be suitable for saving. Query strings are included in the filename.

If two responses are received for the same URL they overwrite each other, so you will always have the latest response saved in the mirror.

The Mirror tool saves responses as they stream through Charles, therefore it is not effected by the recording limit set in the Recording Settings.

Selected Locations

The tool can be enabled for every request or only for selected locations. When used for selected locations you limit the tool's effects to specified hosts and or paths using simple but powerful pattern matches.

Alternative

Rather than using the Mirror tool you can also right-click on a node in the tree in Charles to save all the responses to disk after you've recorded them; that may prove to be an easier approach than configuring this tool. The only exception to this is that the Mirror tool is not limited by the recording limit set in the Recording Settings, whereas saving responses later is limited so very large responses will be lost.

Side Effects

If the Mirror tool is enabled for a request it will cause any compressed or encoded responses to be decoded. So if the server delivers a compressed response it will be decompressed by Charles before being passed on to the client, which usually won't have any effect but you may notice if you have built your own client or if the client is expecting compressed responses. With web browsers there is no effect.