Localhost Testing

OpenReplay needs public access (HTTPS only) to your app’s resources (CSS, fonts and icons) to properly render the recordings. We copy those resources so you can still replay your sessions even though your app’s content has changed. Images are handled differently, they are retrieved in real-time when a session gets replayed.

For these reasons we recommend testing the installation on a publicly accessible environment (i.e. staging) rather than in localhost. There is still a workaround for local development even though it’s not perfect: use of ngrok (or any similar solution) to make you web app resources accessible to OpenReplay.

Install ngrok then follow these steps:

  1. Run ngrok with your localhost port (i.e. ngrok http 3000 if your server is running at localhost:3000).
  2. Open your application at the specified ngrok URL (i.e. https://558csdft.ngrok.io). Make sure to use the HTTPS link otherwise OpenReplay won’t capture anything for security reasons.

Session replays should be available afterwards in the dashboard, but they might be missing images as explained above.

Have questions?

Section titled Have questions?

If you have any questions about this process, feel free to reach out to us on our Slack or check out our Forum.