Test localhost and staging websites that are not publicly accessible

BrowserStack can integrate with test suites pointing to your localhost URL, staging environment, and even websites behind one or more proxies/firewalls. This is done using BrowserStack Local - a tunneling feature that establishes a secure connection between your machine and the BrowserStack Cloud.

Prerequisites

You need to have BrowserStack Username and Access key, which you can find in your account settings. If you have not created an account yet, you can sign up for a Free Trial or purchase a plan.
BrowserStack SDK is installed in your automation test suite.

Configure BrowserStack Local

Once you have installed the BrowserStack SDK, ensure the browserstackLocal parameter is set to true in your browserstack.yml config file. You can now test your private websites on BrowserStack.

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Check BrowserStack Local connectivity

Run this sample test to check if BrowserStack Local is working as expected and can connect to BrowserStack servers.

Clone sample git repository

Clone the sample jest-js-browserstack repository and install required dependencies using the following commands:

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Set BrowserStack credentials

Set userName and accessKey in the browserstack.yml config file. Skip this step if you have already set credentials as environment variables.

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Execute build on BrowserStack

From the root directory of this project, run the following command:

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If the test fails, refer to the following section for additional configuration that may be needed.

Additional configuration

BrowserStack Local works out of the box in most cases, but depending on the URL being tested and your network setup, additional configuration may be needed. Following are the frequently occurring scenarios:

The URL being tested is accessible from the internet but serves different content within your internal network.

This is common with staging environments set up as sub-domains and configured to work only in your private/VPN network. In this case, add the following entry in your browserstack.yml file.

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The forceLocal capability resolves all network traffic through the BrowserStack Local tunnel.

Testing on Safari and iOS devices

When testing localhost on Safari desktop browsers and iOS real devices, your automation scripts Get URL/Open URL commands are redirecting to bs-local.com. This is a necessary action due to circumventing Safari browser behaviors and limitations. Check out the detailed explanation in this FAQ.

Potential impact on your test scripts

If your application is not honoring relative URLs and explicitly refers to localhost from a config file, for example. In this case, we recommend honoring relative URLs in your web application as a best practice or handling this case as you deem fit.

Bypass invalid certificate browser warnings

To avoid invalid certificate errors while testing on our remote browsers, set the acceptInsecureCerts capability at the root level in your browserstack.yml file.