Autify Connect Tips and Common Errors

I am not able to use Autify Connect to test websites running on localhost

localhost tests will not work correctly if the target URL of the scenario links directly to a local host or local network, such as http://localhost and http://127.0.0.1.

Instead, please use one of the following methods to run tests:

1. Use localhost.autify.com.

   We have an FQDN pointing to 127.0.0.1. You can use this FQDN instead of localhost or 127.0.0.1.

   If you have already recorded a test scenario with a hostname such as localhost, you can use the URL Replacement feature in the test plan.

2. Use another IP address, such as 192.168.86.92.

3. Edit the hosts file and set an application alias as follows:

   127.0.0.1       local.your-application.com
   ::1             local.your-application.com
   
   

   The hosts file is usually located at the following path:

   OS	Path
   Linux, macOS	/etc/hosts
   Windows	c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts

Note that the following hostnames are not supported (this is not an exhaustive list).

localhost
*.localhost
[::1]
127.0.0.1/8
169.254/16
[FE80::]/10

If you record a scenario using these hostnames, you will need to implement one of the methods described above.

I get a “ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR” error when executing a test against a website that uses a HTTPS scheme

Try to use 443 for the port of the application under test (e.g https://local.autify.com:443), or use http instead of https.

Why did my test fail with an error of “The site can’t be reached” ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED. “

This error can be caused by a number of reasons listed below:

• Poor network performance in the environment (this is the most frequent cause of this error)
• The Autify Connect client was shut down during test execution
• Poor application performance under high traffic (e.g. when running lots of test scenarios to a localhost application with ~10 parallel)
• The Autify Connect server has a problem and isn’t able to handle test connections.

How to write logs in JSON format

To help troubleshoot an issue, our Customer Support team will sometimes request Autify Connect client logs in JSON format.

To do so, run autifyconnect with the --log-format=json option.

$ autifyconnect --log-format=json

{
  "level": "info",
  "ts": "2022-09-07T19:56:07.862+0900",
  "msg": "Starting to establish a secure connection with the Autify connect server. Your session ID is \"{sessionID}\"."
}

How to save Autify Connect client logs

Linux / macOS / Windows Powershell users
The built-in tee command can be ussed to write Autify Connect logs to a file as follows:

autifyconnect -V --log-format=json  | tee your-log-filename.log

Log level

The level field represents the log level. There are four log levels.

How to continously check the status of the Autify Connect client's connection

To continuously verify that autifyconnect is connected to the Autify Connect server and ready to use for test executions, use the --debug-server-port option that was added in v0.5.8 (see Autify Connect client Release Notes (autifyconnect command) for more details).

Using this option, a server for debugging and monitoring launches on your local machine on the specified port.

For example, the command below runs the autifyconnect application which serves the debug server endpoint on port 9191.

$ autifyconnect --debug-server-port 9191

Once the debug server is running, the status of the Autify Connect client can be checked using the /status endpoint. When the Autify Connect client is ready, the response after checking that endpoint will be like this:

$ curl http://localhost:9191/status

{
  "status": "ready",
  "message": "(description)..."
}

For more detailed information about other statuses and their meaning, please refer to the table below: