Fix issues with using Website Scanner for local testing

Learn how to troubleshoot issues when scanning web pages in a lower environment with Website Scanner

Local Testing enables remote browsers and devices from the BrowserStack cloud to access websites hosted on your internal networks, which are otherwise not accessible over the public Internet.

You can use Local Testing with Website Scanner to scan your web pages in a lower environment before they become public.

For various reasons, Local Testing connections sometimes fail. This topic covers common failure cases and how to troubleshoot them.

Error: Local connection could not be established

Ensure that your BrowserStack Local binary runs before you start a website scan. If the binary does not run before a scan or stops during the scan, the scan fails and you see the following message at the report or the URL level: Local connection could not be established

If this happens, restart the binary:

The binary takes up to 5 seconds to start. Wait until you see the following message:

[SUCCESS] You can now access your local server(s) in our remote browser

Then, start your scan again.

Error: When the local binary is running but Website Scanner can’t access local pages

If your website is behind a proxy, and you did not specify the proxy detail when starting the binary, you see an appropriate HTTP error for each private URL in the scan.

If your website is behind a proxy, restart the binary with the details of the proxy host and port, and try running your scan again. If you still run into issues, contact support.

The following example starts a binary with localhost as the proxy host and 8888 as the proxy port:

The example also specifies a username and password for the proxy. Whether you need them or not depends on your proxy server requirements.

Related topics

• Add local testing setup
• Flags for local binary