I have a test system (various web pages / web applications), that is hosted in an environment accessible only via machines with IP addresses that are white listed. I control the white list.
Our CI system is cloud hosted (Gitlab), so VMs are spun up dynamically as needed to run automated integration tests as a part of the build pipeline.
The tests in question use BrowserStack automation to run Selenium based tests, which means the source IP addresses of the BrowserStack automation driven requests that hit the test environment are dynamic, as BS is cloud hosted. Also the IP addresses of our test runner machines that call / invoke the BrowserStack automation are dynamic as well.
The whole system worked fine before the intro of IP white listing on the test environment. Since white listing was enabled, the BrowserStack tests can no longer access the environment URLs (due to not being able to white list the dynamic IPs).
I have been trying to get the CI driven tests working again using BS "Local Testing" feature, outlined here https://www.browserstack.com/local-testing.
I have set-up a dedicated Linux VM with a static IP address (cloud hosted). I have installed and am running the BrowserStackLocal.exe binary, using our BS key. It starts up fine and says it has connected to BrowserStack via a web socket. My understanding is this should cause all http(s) etc requests that come from my CI / BrowserStack automation driven tests to be routed through that stand-alone machine (via BS cloud), resulting in it's static IP address being the source of the requests seen at the test environment. This IP addr is white listed.
This is the command that is running on the dedicated / static IP machine:
BrowserStackLocal.exe --{access key} --verbose 3
I have also tried the below, but it made no apparent difference:
BrowserStackLocal.exe --{access key} --force-local --verbose 3
However, this does not seem to work? Either through "live" testing if I try and access the test env directly through BrowserStack, or through BS automate. In both cases the http(s) requests all time out and cannot access our test environment URLs. Also even with --verbose 3 logging level enabled on the BrowserStackLocal.exe process, I never see any request being logged on the stand-alone / static IP machine when I try to run the tests in various ways.
So I am wondering if this is the correct way to solve this problem? Am I misunderstanding how to do this? Do I need to run the BrowserStackLocal.exe perhaps on the same CI runner machine that is invoking the BS automation? This would be problematic as these have dynamic IPs as well (currently).
Thanks in advance for any help!
EDIT/UPDATE: I managed to get this to work!! (Sort of) - it's just a bit slow. If I run the following command on my existing dedicated / static IP server:
BrowserStackLocal.exe --key {mykey} --force-local --verbose 3
Then on another machine (like my dev laptop) if I hit the BS web driver server http://hub-cloud.browserstack.com/wd/hub, and access the site http://www.whatsmyip.org/ to see what IP address comes back, and it did (eventually) come back with my static IP machines address! The problem though is it was quite slow - 20-30 secs for that one site hit, so still looking at alternative solutions. Note for this to work your test code must set the "local" browserstack capability flag to 'true' - eg for Node.js:
// Input capabilities
var capabilities = {
'browserstack.local' : 'true'
}
UPDATE 2: Turning down the --verbose logging level on the local binary (or leaving that flag off completely) seemed to improve things - I am getting 5-10 sec response times now for each request. That might have to do. But this does work as described.
SOLUTION: I managed to get this to work - it's just a bit slow. If I run the following command on my existing dedicated / static IP server (note adding verbose logging seems to slow things down more, so no --verbose flag used now):
BrowserStackLocal.exe --key {mykey} --force-local
Then on another machine (like my dev laptop) if I hit the BS web driver server http://hub-cloud.browserstack.com/wd/hub, and access the site http://www.whatsmyip.org/ to see what IP address comes back, and it did come back with my static IP machines address. Note for this to work your test code must set the "local" browserstack capability flag to 'true' - eg for Node.js:
// Input capabilities
var capabilities = {
'browserstack.local' : 'true'
}
So while a little slow, that might have to do. But this does work as described.