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.

Learn the benefits of using BrowserStack SDK

Following are the benefits of using BrowserStack SDK against manual integration process:

Integration Steps	BrowserStack SDK	Manual Integration / Other Cloud providers
Webdriver changes to run tests on BrowserStack	Supported without any code changes	Requires code changes to change RemoteWebdriver
Sending test context to BrowserStack for reporting	Supported without any code changes	Requires code changes in test suite
Integration with BrowserStack Local	Supported via config	Requires code changes in test suite
Basic cross-browser/device parallelisation	Supported via config	May require code changes in test suite
Advanced parallelisation strategies*	Supported via config	May require code / architecture changes in test suite
Time taken to complete integration	Less than 15 min	Upto 4 hours*

* Depending on your test framework

Prerequisites

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

• BrowserStack Robot SDK is installed in your automation test suite.

Configuring BrowserStack Local

Once you have installed the BrowserStack SDK, ensure the browserstackLocal property is set to true in your browserstack.yml config file. You can now test your private websites on BrowserStack.

Check 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. 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, add the following entry in your browserstack.yml 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 rewritten to bs-local.com. This is a necessary action due to circumventing Safari browser behaviors and limitations. Read more about it here.

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.yml 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