Test on Staging

Before you go live and start serving traffic over the intelligent edge, it's a good idea to activate your property on ​Akamai​'s staging network, point your browser to an edge server, then preview and test your property's configuration.

1. In the Property Manager Editor, click Activate, then click Activate v# on Staging for the configuration version you want to activate. Activation can take up to 20 minutes.

2. Find your edge hostname in the Property Hostnames panel.

3. From a terminal, perform a dig or nslookup to find the IP address of the staging version of that edge hostname, and copy it to your clipboard. The staging version of your edge hostname inserts -staging before .net.

4. Open your local hosts file in a text editor and add an entry that includes the IP address of the staging version of the Edge hostname and your property's domain. For example: 1.2.3.4 www.my-application.com

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Resolve the IP address every time you test

​Akamai​'s staging network is intended for testing. So, it can change over time. You should always perform steps 3-4 to resolve the IP address for your staging edge hostname before you start a new round of testing. Don't use a past address, and don't use the same address for an extended period of time.

5. Open a browser and request that domain. Confirm that the response headers show X-Akamai-Staging: ESSL or X-Akamai-Staging: EdgeSuite, indicating that the request is going to the staging Edge server.

6. Check that your site is functioning as expected, then remove the hosts file entry and save the file.

Once you're happy with the functionality of your API Acceleration property, you can Go live.