Changing the link crawler's starting URL

By default, the Link Crawler will begin crawling links at the base URL of your environment. In some cases, however, you may want to override this default behavior. For example, this may be useful if your environment URL points to an authentication page, but you would still like to crawl your actual application's links once your login flow has executed. To do so, you can add an optional Crawler starting URL parameter to specify the URL the Link Crawler should start at.

When you set a Crawler starting URL, the Link Crawler will still begin by loading your environment's base URL and optionally logging into your application using your stored credentials, if configured. Once logged in, the Link Crawler will navigate to the new starting URL and begin crawling links.

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NOTE

You cannot specify a starting URL with a different domain than your environment's base URL. That means you cannot configure an environment with a base URL of www.mabl.com and try to make the Link Crawler crawl the entire internet by specifying a starting URL of www.google.com. The Link Crawler will not traverse links that do not match your environment's domain (in this case, mabl.com).

Change the crawler's starting URL

1. Open the link crawler plan - "Check all pages for broken links and errors" - for the application under test.
2. Click Edit.
3. Scroll down to the "Tests" section.
4. Next to the "Visit all linked pages" test, click Configure data-driven variables.
5. Click Add Parameter and (if applicable) choose mabl parameter as the "Parameter Type".
6. Choose Crawler starting URL as the "Parameter Name".
7. Entire the desired starting URL as the "Value".
8. Click Done and save the Plan.