Inbound IP Whitelisting

Let BrowserStack reach your IP-restricted servers directly through whitelisted IP addresses, without the Local binary.

Prerequisites

• Your network resources are publicly discoverable (private.mywebsite.com) but access restricted based on the IP of the requester.
• You can whitelist a static set of IPs to allow them access for the above.

IP whitelisting overview

With IP whitelisting, the BrowserStack cloud accesses your assets directly through a fixed set of machines. Your network administrator whitelists the IP addresses of these machines. Traffic does not go through the Local binary or the Local desktop app.

How IP whitelisting works

E1 Host Machine makes a call to BrowserStack backend, to signal start of testing session.

E2 Backend allocates an appropriate device as per requested capabilities, and asks the device to use the Repeater as a proxy.

E3 Backend informs the Repeater of the device allocated to the session, and asks it to allow the allocated device to use it as a proxy.

E4 Devices start making all network calls via the Repeater.

E5 Repeater checks if the request can be resolved via the public internet, or if it needs access to your network.

E6 Repeater hits the your internal network to resolve the request. There are 2 pre-requisites:

• You can only resolve public-internet resources which are access-restricted to IPs within your network.
• You will need to whitelist inbound traffic from a set of our Repeaters. We will share a list of IPs with your company, which will need to be granted access.
  If you don’t want to grant access to a large set, you can opt to have a dedicated Repeater for your account, which will be exclusively set aside for resolution to your network.

Entities

• Your Network: Your subnet, controlled by your network regulator.
• Your Firewall: The firewall being used inside your network.
• Host Machine: The machine running your tests. This can but doesn’t have to be the same as the one running Your Application Server.
• Your Application Server: The internal staging which hosts your local assets.
• BrowserStack Backend: Our application for verifying credentials and general housekeeping.
• Repeater: Highly secure intermediary between your network and ours.
• Devices: Real devices, hosted in BrowserStack datacenters across the world.
• Public Internet: The rest of the publicly accessible internet.

FAQs

For questions such as how many IP addresses to whitelist, see the IP whitelisting FAQs.