Proxy & Traffic Capture

Enabling the Proxy

1. Open the Servers tab (Cmd+2)
2. Find the server you want to intercept — all servers from supported clients are listed automatically
3. Click the Proxy off button on the server card
4. Conduit rewrites the client config to route traffic through conduit-shim
5. Restart the AI client so it picks up the new config

Note

Conduit creates a backup of the original config at ~/.conduit/backups/ before rewriting. You can always restore manually if needed.

What Happens Under the Hood

When you enable the proxy for a stdio server:

1. The original server entry in the client config (e.g. claude_desktop_config.json) is saved to ~/.conduit/shims/<server-id>.json
2. The config entry is replaced to point at conduit-shim with a reference to the saved config
3. When the AI client starts the server, it launches conduit-shim instead
4. The shim spawns the real server and pipes all traffic through while sending copies to Conduit

For HTTP/SSE servers, Conduit spins up a local reverse proxy and rewrites the server URL in the client config to point at it.

Disabling the Proxy

Click the Proxy on button to restore the original config. The shim config is cleaned up automatically.

Tip

You can toggle the proxy on and off without losing any captured traffic. Sessions persist in the database until you explicitly delete them.

Supported Clients

Conduit auto-discovers MCP servers from these clients:

Client	Config Path
Claude Desktop	~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Claude Code	~/.claude.json (including nested projects.*.mcpServers)
Cursor	~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/saoudrizwan.claude-dev/settings/cline_mcp_settings.json
Windsurf	~/Library/Application Support/Windsurf/User/globalStorage/saoudrizwan.claude-dev/settings/cline_mcp_settings.json

Transports

Transport	Interception Method
stdio	conduit-shim binary wraps the real server process
HTTP / SSE	Local axum reverse proxy forwards requests to the real server URL