How can I play a script that needs to reach a site on a private network?

Normally, when you play a script from your Loadster web dashboard, Loadster generates the traffic from a shared engine on the public internet. Of course, this doesn’t work so well when your site is on a private network and therefore unreachable.

If the site you’re testing is unreachable, the requests will fail, often with one of these errors:

unknown host
connect timeout
could not connect to host
could not connect to server

No problem! You can run your own Loadster Engine on the same network as the site you’re testing, or on a network that is allowed to route traffic to it, and select that self-hosted engine as your script player.

Run your own Loadster Engine

Follow the instructions in Testing with Loadster Engine to install and configure your engine. For the purposes of scripting, you only need one, but if you need to run large load tests you can install more.

Using a self-hosted Loadster Engine is included at no additional cost, whether you’re testing with a Loadster plan or Loadster Fuel.

Select the engine as your Script Player

After you’ve registered your new engine, go to Settings and select it as your Script Player. This is a global setting, so the next time you play a script, the traffic will be generated from your self-hosted engine instead of the public one.