Capture traffic
Recording and sessions
Pause and resume recording, clear or remove captured requests, and understand how Cloak Proxy keeps a session in memory until you save or export it.
Everything Cloak Proxy captures goes into the current session: the list of requests in the main window. You can pause recording to stop the list from growing, clear it to start over, and save it to a file to keep it. This page covers those basics.
Pause recording
Section titled “Pause recording”Pausing stops new requests from being added to the list. Traffic keeps flowing through Cloak Proxy, and your debugging tools keep working: only the recording stops. Use it to freeze the list while you read it, or to keep noise out between two tests.
| Where | Control |
|---|---|
| Keyboard | ⇧ ⌘ R |
| Menu bar | Proxy › Pause Recording / Resume Recording |
| Toolbar | Pause / Record (the red record button) |
| Search Everything (⇧ ⌘ A) | Pause Recording / Resume Recording |
While recording is paused:
- the toolbar pill turns orange and reads Paused,
- the status bar shows Recording paused,
- the toolbar button reads Record. Press it, or ⇧ ⌘ R, to resume.
A request that was still in progress when you paused may keep showing as in progress, because its response arrives while recording is off. Sessions you open from a file are added even while recording is paused.
Recording is on every time Cloak Proxy opens.
Clear the session
Section titled “Clear the session”Clearing removes every request from the list, along with their highlights and comments, and selects All Traffic in the sidebar again.
| Where | Control |
|---|---|
| Keyboard | ⌘ K |
| Menu bar | File › Clear Session |
| Toolbar | Clear (the trash button) |
| Search Everything | Clear Session |
Clearing doesn’t touch your settings, rules, pinned sidebar items or saved filter presets.
Remove some requests
Section titled “Remove some requests”To remove only some requests, select them in the traffic list, right-click, and choose Remove (or Remove followed by the number of requests when several are selected). Their highlights and comments go with them.
How sessions are kept
Section titled “How sessions are kept”The status bar counts the requests in the current session.
- How many requests the session holds, or how many match your filters
- The current session, newest at the bottom by default
| Behavior | Details |
|---|---|
| Kept in memory | The session lives in memory only. Nothing is written to disk automatically. |
| Lost on quit | Quitting Cloak Proxy discards the session. Save it first to keep it. |
| Not lost when you close the window | Closing the main window keeps Cloak Proxy running and recording. Click the Dock icon to bring it back. |
| Up to 50,000 requests | When the session grows past 50,000 requests, Cloak Proxy drops the oldest 5,000 to make room. |
| Large bodies | Bodies larger than the Max captured body size (32 MB by default) are kept only in part. They’re still forwarded in full. |
| Annotations | Highlights and comments belong to the session and are removed with their requests. |
Save, open and export
Section titled “Save, open and export”| Task | How |
|---|---|
| Save the whole session | File › Save Session… (⌘ S) saves every captured request as a .cloaksession file. |
| Open a saved session or another tool’s file | File › Open Session… (⌘ O) opens .cloaksession, HAR (.har), Charles JSON (.chlsj) and .json files. You can select several files. |
| Open by dragging | Drop one of those files onto the main window. |
| Export | File › Export saves as Cloak Proxy Session, HAR, CSV, Postman Collection or OpenAPI (YAML). It exports the selected requests when more than one is selected, otherwise all visible requests. |
| Export from the list | Right-click requests and choose Export Request or Export followed by the number of requests. |
Opened requests are added to the current session rather than replacing it. Each gets a new number, and requests without an app are listed under an app named Imported: followed by the file name. See Save and open sessions, Import and Export.
Automate recording
Section titled “Automate recording”- MCP tools
set_recordingandclear_sessionpause, resume and clear from an AI assistant. See MCP server. cloakctl export --out session.harsaves the running app’s session as HAR. See cloakctl.cloakctl run --record run.harrecords a headless proxy to a file. See Headless and CI.