Is there a way to get wireshark to capture packets sent from/to localhost on Windows?

Solution 1:

There's a WIKI Entry about exactly this issue on the wireshark homepage.

They also mention specifics about the loopback interface regarding Windows - you could be running just into that.

You can't capture on the local loopback address 127.0.0.1 with a Windows packet capture driver like WinPcap.

Solution 2:

In Wireshark you need to choose the lo0 interface... not En0 or En1.

Go to:

  • Show the capture options
  • Under "Interface" choose: lo0
  • Capture and you'll see a bunch of 127.0.0.1 communication

Solution 3:

you can use RawCap Application to capture loopback packets and save them in a pcap file ... and then you can open it using Wireshark