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 the BrowserStack Username and Access key, which you can find in your account profile. If you have not created an account yet, you can sign up for a Free Trial or purchase a plan.

Run your Local test

Follow the steps to configure and run your SpecFlow tests for Local Testing.

1. Clone the specflow-browserstack repository on GitHub that contains BrowserStack’s sample test, if you haven’t already done so:

    git clone -b selenium-3 https://github.com/browserstack/specflow-browserstack
   

2. Open the Specflow-BrowserStack.sln solution file in Visual Studio.

3. Update your SpecFlow App.config config file by setting your credentials and setting the browserstack.local capability to true.

      <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
      <configuration>
      <appSettings>
      <add key="user" value="YOUR_USERNAME" />
      <add key="key" value="YOUR_ACCESS_KEY" />
      <add key="server" value="hub.browserstack.com" />
      </appSettings>
   
      <capabilities>
      <local>
        <add key="buildName" value="browserstack-build-1" />
        <add key="sessionName" value="BStack parallel specflow" />
        <add key="local" value="true" />
   
      </local>
      </capabilities>
   
      <environments>
      <chrome>
        <add key="browser" value="chrome" />  
      </chrome>
      </environments>
      </configuration>
    
   

4. Run a sample test case using the following command, to check whether the Local test connection has been setup properly.

    dotnet test --filter "Category=local"
   

5. You can now run your SpecFlow test using BrowserStack Local with the following steps:

   1. Build the solution in Visual Studio.
   2. Run test with fixture local from Test Explorer.

Next steps

After you have successfully run your first test using BrowserStack Local, you can explore the following sections:

• Run multiple tests in parallel to speed up the build execution
• Testing your local site that might be behind a proxy
• Local flags to customize your local testing setup