# mitmproxy

27 Hacker News commenters recommended mitmproxy and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free HTTP and HTTPS interception proxy that people trust for inspecting and modifying traffic, with Python scripting. Common caveats: terminal keybindings are hard to learn, and not all workflows work yet.

## Why people recommend it

- Scriptable with Python (4 comments): "Python for tweaking http streams in mitmproxy is powerful and rather friendly for what you get in return" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45831468)) "mitmproxy has advanced scripting capabilities with a decent amount of community examples available" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337103)) "I have had great experience scripting and running mitmproxy for these purposes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46421035))
- Reliable and trusted over years (3 comments): "mitmproxy is very reliable as it has years of polish" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48439227)) "Mitm proxy is very reliable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436666)) "I know and trust mitmproxy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46803797))
- Easy setup, works out of box (3 comments): "the Docker version is really easy to set up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338837)) "nice to just have it working out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50189883)) "Takes like 5 mins to figure out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46102068))
- Captures HTTPS and WebSocket traffic (3 comments): "A mitmproxy capture is higher fidelity and supports capturing modern features such as WebSockets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530537)) "I used to have a bunch of mitm commands in my bashrc to easily intercept https messages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336549)) "mitmproxy/Charles are great when the traffic is HTTP and on the network path" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510334))

## What people warn about

- Terminal keybindings hard to use (2 comments): "I don't have much of a problem with their tmux-like UI, but I find mitmweb a lot easier to use than the keyboard shortcut based terminal navigation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337147)) "until they changed all they keybindings around version 2" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334692))
- TLS handshake and certificate problems (2 comments): "then the TLS handshake started failing and it kept requesting for re-authentication when proxied" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802191)) "mitmproxy doesnt check it even when ssl_insecure=false" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46811103))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Charles Proxy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/charles-proxy.md): 30 recommend
- [Proxyman](https://hackerapproved.com/p/proxyman.md): 20 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "mitmproxy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mitmproxy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).