Using Fullstory on an Internal Server

Fullstory supports capturing and playback of sessions on localhost or internal testing servers, but with a small caveat.

Our data capture process snapshots copies of resources, such as images and style sheets, used by each page to ensure proper playback in the future. We do this so you can change the way your site looks at any time, even delete the superseded assets from your servers, and older Fullstory sessions still play back the way they looked at the time they were captured.

However, Fullstory can't snapshot a resource if our servers (outside your network) can't access it. This can happen when you are capturing from a development server that is firewalled or unreachable, such as localhost. To compensate, Fullstory playback will automatically enter "fallback mode" in which your browser will fetch resources from your origin server as needed during playback.

It is only advisable to lean on this fallback while testing out Fullstory internally. For production environments, we strongly recommend giving Fullstory's servers access to your CSS and images to ensure older sessions continue to playback smoothly and correctly as time goes on. Check out our documentation on FullStoryBot to further implement this solution.

Fallback mode only works if the browser in which you are watching sessions can reach the origin server during playback. Additionally, for security reasons, if fallback mode attempts to load a resource over HTTP and not HTTPS, your browser will block the loading of the resource. If you're capturing on an internal server that does not run HTTPS, resources will fail to load during playback.

If your local or test server cannot support HTTPS:

Although we advise trying to test on servers over HTTPS, if this is not an option, you can choose to temporarily enable "mixed content" so you can try out Fullstory before going into production. Here are a few suggestions for our most popular user browsers. If you're using a browser other than Firefox or Chrome, try searching for "enable mixed content your browser name" to find instructions on how to toggle this setting.

  • How to enable mixed content in Firefox
  • Chrome disabled the ability to toggle the mixed content setting. However, we do have one suggestion for getting it to work temporarily -- Open an instance of Chrome that supports mixed content via command line (below is the way to do so on a Mac).

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --allow-running-insecure-content &`

Again, we want to stress that this should only be used for testing out Fullstory on your localhost or internal servers, and only if you can't get your test environment to serve over HTTPS. Real production traffic can be captured over plain HTTP, and should not require disabling mixed content since Fullstory should have access to your CSS and images, and will securely snapshot them.

Still having issues? You may also want to check out these related article:

 


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