Fix BrowserStack Local connection issues identified during a session

Learn to fix BrowserStack Local connection issues that might impact your test stability

Issue

When you run a test using BrowserStack Automate, the following warning might appear on the Issues Detected tab in the Automate dashboard.

Issues identified with BrowserStack Local connection

Cause

When you are testing your application in a privately hosted dev or staging environment, there are multiple factors at play. BrowserStack Local creates a secure tunnel connection between your network and the BrowserStack cloud so that the browsers in the BrowserStack cloud can access the application that you’re running in a private network. Since all the network requests from the browser get resolved through the tunnel, any network fluctuations or connection failures might impact the test runs.

Some factors that might cause these issues are:

• User network errors - These are errors that generally indicate network issues in your setup. Please try to ensure that you have a stable Internet connection on your end.
• Multiple Local binaries installed - BrowserStack Local binaries create a secure tunnel between your local machine and BrowserStack. While starting up the binary, if you’re specifiying a localIdentifier argument then you have to ensure that the same identifier is not used for a second connection while this connection is active. If the same localIdentifier argument is used for a subsequent binary connection, then the earlier connection is disconnected and a new connection is established. This might lead to failure/instability of tests that have been running using the first connection.

Why you must mitigate this issue

As an organization, optimizing your builds to run faster, is crucial. BrowserStack understands the need to identify issues that might not be evident, but have a large impact on the speed and stability of your test sessions.

Use the resolutions provided to mitigate these issues so as to:

• Improve performance
• Reduce test flakiness

Resolution/Workaround

You can try the following options to resolve this issue:

• Fix any network issues in your setup and try running the tests.
• If you intend to use multiple binaries, ensure that a unique localIdentifier name is set for each build.
• Do not reuse localIdentifier names.