A web application intended to be called by a cloud service is debugged locally in a developer's machine. A debugging session is configured to initiate execution of the web application in its intended cloud context by utilizing a reverse proxy mechanism to forward network traffic from a calling cloud service to the developer's machine. In a first embodiment, an integrated development environment (IDE) is able to establish a connection with the reverse proxy mechanism during the debugging session. In a second embodiment, a separate process is used to establish the connection with the reverse proxy mechanism where the separate process is outside of the IDE.