TL;DR
Is there a tool can record all the network activity as I visit a website and create a mock server that responds to those requests with the same responses?
I'm investigating ways of mocking the complex backend for our React application. We're currently developing against the real backend (plus test/staging environments). I've looked around a bit and it looks there are a number of tools for mocking individual endpoints/features and sending the rest through to the real API (Mirage is leading the pack at the moment).
However, the Platonic ideal would be to mock the entire server so that a front end dev can work without an internet connection (again: Platonic ideal). It's a crazy lofty goal, I know this. And of course it would require mocking not only our backend but also requests any 3rd-party data sources. And of course the data would be thin and dumb and stale. But this is just for ultra-speedy front end development, it's just mocking. The data doesn't need to be rich, it'll be up to us to make it as useful/realistic as we need it to be.
Probably the quickest way would be to recreate the responses the backend is already sending, and then modifying as needed for new features or features under test etc. To do this, we might go into Chrome DevTools and recreate everything on the network tab. Mock every request that was made by hardcoding response that returned. Taking it from there, do smart things like use url pattern matching to return a simple placeholder image for any request to get a user's avatar.
What I want to know is: is there any tool out there that does this automatically? That can watch as I load the site, click a bunch of stuff, take a bunch of actions, and spit out or set up a mock that recreates all the responses? And then we could edit any of them as we saw fit to simplify.
Does something like this exist? Maybe it's a browser tool. Maybe it's webpack middleware. Maybe it's a magic rooster.
PS. I imagine this may not be a specific, actionable enough question for SO. I'll understand if it's closed, but I'd really appreciate being directed somewhere where such questions/discussions would fit? I'm new enough to this world that SO is all I know!