Netlogger Dev

NetLogger Development Guide

This skill provides essential procedural knowledge and architecture overview for maintaining and developing the NetLogger jailbreak tweak.

Core Architecture

NetLogger is an in-process network interceptor (Tweak) for iOS (specifically Dopamine rootless). It intercepts network requests and responses directly within the target application's process.

Key Components

1. Core Hooking (Tweak.x):

   • Hooks NSURLSessionConfiguration to inject NLURLProtocol.
   • Hooks C-level SSL/TLS and POSIX socket functions (e.g., SSLWrite, SSLRead, send, recv) using MSHookFunction.
   • Implements applyMitmRules, applyMitmRequestRules, applyMitmResponseRules to intercept and manipulate JSON/Headers via a JavaScriptCore Engine or key-path matching.

2. Preference Bundle (netloggerprefs/):

   • iOS Settings app integration using PreferenceLoader.
   • Important: Detail Controllers (like NLBlacklistController, NLMitmRulesController, NLLogDetailViewController) MUST subclass PSViewController (not UIViewController), implement loadView, and avoid manual view initialization in viewDidLoad to prevent doesNotRecognizeSelector: SIGABRT crashes in the Settings app.
   • Localization (i18n): Supports English (en.lproj) and Vietnamese (vi.lproj). Strings are managed via Localizable.strings and Root.strings and accessed using the NLLocalizedString macro in NLLocalization.h.

3. Sileo Depiction (docs/depictions/com.minh.netlogger.json):

   • Uses Sileo Native Depiction format.
   • minVersion must be at least 0.4 to support Screenshots.

Build and Deployment Workflow

Always use the custom build script instead of manually running make package.

# Clean, compile (with DEBUG=0 FINALPACKAGE=1), package, and update apt repository hashes (MD5, SHA256)
./update_repo.sh

Git Workflow: After a successful build, always commit the changes and push to the remote repository (GitHub Pages acts as the APT repository).

git add .
git commit -m "feat/fix: Description"
git push

Best Practices & Guidelines

1. Handling Settings UI (PreferenceLoader)

• NEVER subclass UIViewController directly for screens launched from Root.plist or other preference cells. Always use <Preferences/PSViewController.h>.
• Keyboard Handling: For screens with text inputs at the bottom (e.g., MitM Rules), always implement UIKeyboardWillShowNotification and UIKeyboardWillHideNotification to adjust the tableView.contentInset.
• Background Colors: When highlighting table cells in iOS 13+, restore the color to [UIColor secondarySystemGroupedBackgroundColor] instead of nil to prevent transparency bugs in grouped tables.

2. JavaScriptCore Engine (MitM)

• The MitM engine uses JSContext to evaluate user-provided JavaScript scripts.
• The payload is injected as a global variable named body (Object if JSON, String if text).
• Always wrap JS evaluation in try-catch or use JSContext.exceptionHandler to prevent user-provided scripts from crashing the host app.

3. Localization

• When adding new UI text in netloggerprefs/, wrap strings in NLLocalizedString(@"Key", @"Fallback").
• Update both netloggerprefs/Resources/en.lproj/Localizable.strings and netloggerprefs/Resources/vi.lproj/Localizable.strings.

4. Debugging

• Use NSLog(@"[NetLogger] ...") for logging in Tweak.x. Use the Console app or oslog to view them.
• Ensure DEBUG = 0 and FINALPACKAGE = 1 are set in the root Makefile before releasing to remove debug symbols and reduce .deb size.