Internal Environments

Visual regression runs are executed by headless workers that live in public cloud networks. They can only capture a URL they can reach over the public internet.

There are two options today, and no third

Either the origin has a public route — a preview deployment, a public staging domain, gated or not — or you put a temporary tunnel in front of it for the duration of the run. If neither is possible, RegressionBot cannot test that environment yet. See what is not supported below.

A hostname that resolves to a private address is rejected when the job starts, with Restricted IP address — so an internal DNS name pointing at 10.x or 192.168.x fails immediately rather than timing out.

Gated Preview URLs

A preview deployment that is public but password-protected — Vercel, Netlify, Amplify and similar — is fully supported, and is the setup RegressionBot fits best. Store the credential on the project, then run the project by name.

Two things worth knowing:

Credentials live on the project, not on the run. The worker looks a gate up by the run's project name, so the project must already hold it. A live-vs-live run started under a brand-new name stores no config, and therefore captures ungated.

An ungated capture of a gated origin is silent, not an error: the screenshot of the login page succeeds and every page reports as a huge change. Treat “everything changed” as evidence of a missing credential before reporting it as a finding.

Basic auth, fixed headers and cookies are supported. A login form is not — see below.

Configuring project credentials →

Local & Private: Temporary Tunnels

For a localhost dev server or a private staging host, put a temporary tunnel in front of it for the duration of the run. This is the supported route — not a workaround — and it is what lets you diff uncommitted local work against production, which no commit-triggered integration can do.

Pair the tunnel URL as testOrigin with your production URL as baseOrigin. That is live-vs-live: a real comparison on the first run, with no baseline to prime. Keep the dev server and the tunnel alive until the job reaches COMPLETED.

1. Cloudflare Tunnel

Expose your local development port (e.g. 3000) using a secure Cloudflare tunnel domain during CI runs:

# Spin up a temporary tunnel
cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000

Use the generated ephemeral trycloudflare.com URL as your preview URL in RegressionBot.

2. ngrok

Instantly map a public HTTPS gateway directly onto your locally hosted development/staging servers:

# Spin up ngrok tunnel on port 8080
ngrok http 8080

Pass the returned *.ngrok-free.app address to the visual crawler run.

What Is Not Supported Yet

Rather than have you discover these mid-evaluation:

VPN-only or firewalled staging, where a tunnel is not permitted. If your security policy rules out exposing a pre-release host through trycloudflare.com or ngrok, there is no in-product alternative today. Join the VPC waitlist below.
Origins that need a login form. Basic auth, fixed headers and cookies are handled; RegressionBot does not drive a sign-in form to obtain a session.
Assets that are not publicly reachable. Captures run in a real headless browser, so stylesheets, images and fonts must load from where the worker sits — a page whose CSS is behind the firewall renders unstyled.

Our Playwright package captured screenshots from inside your network and uploaded them, which sidestepped all of this. It is deprecated and no longer maintained, so it is not a recommendation for new work.

Allowlisting, VPN & VPC

Allowlisting by user-agent works today. Every request we make to the origin under test carries a RegressionBot/1.0 token, which a WAF or bot-protection rule can match on — see Allowlisting RegressionBot for the exact strings and copy-pasteable rules. A bot challenge is worth ruling out early: like an expired gate credential, it does not error — the challenge page captures cleanly and the run reports every URL as changed wholesale.

Network-level integration is the part still unbuilt. We are actively designing support for corporate VPN and VPC connectivity:

Need VPN / VPC peering or static IPs?

We are currently recruiting customers for our private beta supporting dedicated VPC gateways and proxy agents.

Please reach out to us at support@regressionbot.com to request access or join the waitlist, and we'll get right back to you.