When your team moves to a cloud testing solution like Sauce Labs, creating a solid, secure connection is likely to be a top priority. One of the solutions to this challenge is Sauce Connect proxy. This is a command line tool that your team can use to create a TLS tunnel from your environment out to Sauce. This can be used to test applications that are not publicly facing; for example, if your team needs access to a local host system or a dev or staging environment. So rather than completely change your setup, you can easily download the proxy from Sauce Labs and run your tests from those internal environments.
Having this kind of structure in place gives your team confidence that the applications you're testing are secured and easily accessible through Sauce Labs. As a best practice, you should use an identifier for the tunnel. This will assign the tunnel a name which you can use while executing tests so you’re able to tell the tunnels apart. This means you won’t have to constantly update tunnels IDs to replace the random identifier that Sauce Labs assigns. Instead, your tunnel IDs can be passed as a capability to any test.
If you’re new to setting up proxy tunnels via the cloud, please take a look at one of our Tech Tip videos below. Senior Solutions Engineer Stan Williams walks you through the process of setting up Sauce Connect, how to point it at Sauce Labs, and best practices to follow.
Best Practice Alert: Keep Sauce Connect Up To Date!
Once you’re well established in using Sauce Connect, it’s a good idea to keep your version up to date in order to ensure a more secure and efficient testing practice. To help provide our customers with the most secure testing experience, we will be eliminating our support for Self Signed Certificates, and instead allowing for only Public Certificate Authority Signed Certificates. To achieve this, we are in the process of deprecating all versions of Sauce Connect prior to 4.6.x. If you are using an older version of Sauce Connect, we highly recommend you take a few minutes to download and install this update. We also have helpful documentation on how to set up Sauce Connect that should make this process as smooth as possible. If applicable, please also ensure you are using the latest version of the Sauce Labs Jenkins plugin.
For further information on how to easily set up Sauce Connect, check out our documentation and our FAQ page. Happy testing!
