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 profile. If you do not have an account yet, please sign up for a Free Trial or purchase a plan.
• Node.js v12+ installed on your machine.
• BrowserStack WDIO service is installed in your automation test suite.

Configure BrowserStack Local

Once you install the BrowserStack WDIO service in your project, add browserstack in the services array of your configuration file, and set the browserstackLocal capability to true, as shown in the following code snippet:

You can now test your private websites on BrowserStack.

Check BrowserStack Local connectivity

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

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 configuration (.conf.js) file.

The forceLocal capability will resolve 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.

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 configuration .conf.js file.

Advanced use-cases and troubleshooting

For restricted networks and troubleshooting, refer the following articles:

• Configure proxy settings (HTTP, MITM)
• Configure proxy using PAC file
• Troubleshoot BrowserStack Local issues