Testing cside on staging Environments
Test cside on a staging environment before going to production, covering IP restrictions, SSL certificate requirements, and the limits of local testing.
Overview
Our customers often like to test out the edge infrastructure on a staging environment before taking it to production. While this is fully supported, developer environments differ from production sites in several ways.
Common Considerations
IP Restrictions
If a staging environment is only accessible to specific IPs, we cannot retrieve the payload of first-party scripts.
- Third-party scripts will continue to work as they are typically publicly accessible
- The dashboard will still display the list of scripts but won’t show the payload of first-party scripts
SSL Certificates
First-party scripts require valid SSL certificate validation.
- Self-signed certificates will prevent first-party scripts from appearing in the dashboard
- Ensure your staging environment uses valid SSL certificates for full functionality
Local Testing
Local testing does not work. cside licenses every script request by the Referer header, and a
loopback host or a bare IP has no registrable domain to check, so the request is rejected with
HTTP 400 before any licensing lookup. This applies to localhost, 127.0.0.1, ::1, LAN
addresses such as 192.168.x.x, and port-forwarded dev boxes.
Add a publicly resolvable staging hostname to cside and test against that. It needs a publicly-trusted TLS certificate for first-party script content to appear.
Additional Notes
For more information about staging environments and licensing considerations, see the Caveats page.
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