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Specialized Environment Setups

What You'll Need​

Real Device Cloud Setup​

Real Device Cloud on Sauce Labs offers public and private mobile devices for users looking to expedite automated and live testing for their mobile apps. You can run a high volume of tests across a broad range of real devices without compromising performance, quality, or reliability.

With Sauce Connect Proxy, you’ll have a secure tunnel for testing apps and websites on your local machine (or behind a firewall) against devices and browsers in the Sauce Labs Real Device Cloud.

Security Considerations​

Restricting Tunnel Deployment to Organization Admins​

If you'd like to restrict Sauce Connect Proxy tunnel deployment to organization admins only, follow the steps in Security Settings to only allow organization admins to start Sauce Connect Proxy tunnels.

Testing with Public Devices​

In order to begin running tests on public devices using Sauce Connect Proxy or IPSec VPN, your organization admin must enable this option in their settings. Follow the steps in Security Settings to enable Sauce Connect Proxy/VPN for public cloud devices.

Once the setting is enabled, all users across your organization can run live and automated tests on public devices over Sauce Connect Proxy or IPSec VPN. Each time you initiate a test, you'll see a temporary pop-up alert window with a reminder that the utilization of a trusted Sauce Connect Proxy or IPSec VPN connection combined with RDC public real device tests may not be compliant with your organization's network policy.

Testing Mobile Devices Against localhost​

Testing with the address localhost (or the IP address 127.0.0.1) is not supported with iOS or Android real devices in Sauce Connect Proxy.

To work around this, you'll need to edit your hosts file on the machine on which you are running Sauce Connect Proxy. Add an entry for a placeholder hostname (such as localtestsite) and the IP address 127.0.0.1. Requests for localtestsite in your tests will then be sent through your Sauce Connect Proxy tunnel to localhost, which is the machine on which you are running Sauce Connect Proxy.

For example, adding 127.0.0.1 mockserver to your /etc/hosts file, then starting a server on localhost:3333 will route mockserver:3333 HTTP calls to your local server. Mobile tests using Sauce Connect will then be able to find your local server regardless of the nature of your test.

For tips on how to edit your hosts file, see How to Edit Hosts File in Linux, Windows, or Mac.

SSL Bumping​

While rare, there are some test cases that will require you to disable SSL Bumping when using Sauce Connect Proxy to avoid certificate issues. For more information, see SSL Certificate Bumping.

Selecting the Tunnel to Use​

Sauce Connect Proxy can have multiple tunnels running simultaneously, as described in High Availability Setup. You can select which tunnel to use in a real device test in the same way as you would any other type of automated test.

  1. Start Sauce Command Proxy from the command line, using the -u (--user), -k (--api-key), -r (--region), and --tunnel-name flags.
./sc -u $SAUCE_USERNAME -k $SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY -r $SAUCE_DATA_CENTER --tunnel-name $TUNNEL_NAME

In this example, we'll set our credentials (username/access key) as environment variables, start a tunnel in US West Data Center and name the tunnel rdc-on-sauce-tunnel-us.

./sc -u $SAUCE_USERNAME -k $SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY -r us-west --tunnel-name rdc-on-sauce-tunnel-us
Note for Android Devices

If you set up the tunnel for Android Devices, you must start Sauce Connect Proxy with the -B all flag:

./sc -u $SAUCE_USERNAME -k $SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY -r $SAUCE_DATA_CENTER --tunnel-name $TUNNEL_NAME -B all

You need to include the -B all flag because, by default, traffic on Sauce Connect is re-encrypted using Sauce Labs' self-signed certificates. While this can be trusted on Sauce Labs Virtual Cloud and Sauce Labs iOS devices, due to security specifications by Google, the same can't be done on Android.

If you add -B, Sauce Labs uses your server certificates, and if the certificate is self-signed, you face the same issue again. For native applications, the workaround is injecting your self-signed certificate into the app. You can learn more on Network Security Configuration in the Android Developers documentation.

  1. In your device testing script, specify the tunnel name with tunnelName in your capabilities, as shown in this Java example:
final DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
    capabilities.setCapability("username", System.getenv("SAUCE_USERNAME"));
    capabilities.setCapability("accessKey", System.getenv("SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY"));
    capabilities.setCapability("platformName", "Android");
    capabilities.setCapability("platformVersion,"  "81.0");
    capabilities.setCapability("deviceName", "Samsung_Galaxy_Note_5_real"); // Will only run on the specified device
    capabilities.setCapability("tunnelName", "rdc-on-sauce-tunnel-us");
final AndroidDriver driver = new AndroidDriver(new URL("https://ondemand.us-west-1.saucelabs.com/wd/hub"), capabilities);

Selecting the Right Data Center Endpoint​

By default, Sauce Labs will automatically connect you to the main US-West-1 Data Center. For information on Sauce Connect Proxy endpoints, see the Sauce Connect Proxy CLI documentation and Data Center Endpoints.

At present, real device testing is supported in the following data centers:

  • US West Data Center (us-west)
  • EU Central Data Center (eu-central)
note

Once you establish a Sauce Connect Proxy tunnel for real device testing, you can also use it for virtual devices (and vice versa).

OnDemand Endpoint Examples for Driver Setup​

To ensure you're testing against the correct data center, you'll need to add the correct OnDemand endpoint when you instantiate a MobileDriver in your automated test:

Driver Setup for US Data Center (Java)
final AndroidDriver driver = new AndroidDriver(new URL("https://ondemand.us-west-1.saucelabs.com/wd/hub"), capabilities);

API Testing Setup​

See API Testing with Sauce Connect Proxy to learn how to start a tunnel for API Testing.