Learn how to test localhost and staging websites

A guide to running your Playwright test on localhost and staging websites.

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.

Run your first local test

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

Step 1: Clone sample git repository

Clone the node-js-playwright-browserstack sample repo on GitHub using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/browserstack/node-js-playwright-browserstack.git
cd node-js-playwright-browserstack

Step 2: Set BrowserStack credentials

Set environment variables for BrowserStack credentials as follows:

# Set these values in your ~/.zprofile (zsh) or ~/.profile (bash)
export BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME="YOUR_USERNAME"
export BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY="YOUR_ACCESS_KEY"

# setx.exe does not set the environment variable in the current command prompt, but it will be available in subsequent command prompts
setx BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME "YOUR_USERNAME"
setx BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY"

# Verify whether the variables have been set
echo BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME
echo BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY

Alternatively, you can also add your BrowserStack credentials in the test cases as shown in the following example:

const caps = {
  'browserstack.username': process.env.BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME || 'YOUR_USERNAME',
  'browserstack.accessKey': process.env.BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY || 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY',
};

Step 3: Install the dependencies

Install dependencies using the following command:

npm install

Step 4: Set Local capability to true

Ensure the browserstackLocal property is set to true in your browserstack.config.js config file. You can now test your private websites on BrowserStack.

const caps = {
  'browserstack.local': process.env.BROWSERSTACK_LOCAL || true, 
};

Step 5: Execute build on BrowserStack

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

npm run sample-local-test

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. Here are the most 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, run the following command:

./BrowserStackLocal --key <your_access_key> --force-local

The given command will resolve all network traffic through the BrowserStack Local tunnel.

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.config.js file.

const caps = {
  acceptInsecureCerts: true
};

Next Steps

• Migrate your existing test suites to run on BrowserStack
• Run your CodeceptJS Playwright tests on BrowserStack
• Run your Jest Playwright tests on BrowserStack