Localhost and staging environments

Development traffic in production numbers is noise. BobRay filters the obvious cases automatically and gives you rules for the rest.

• Key takeaways
• localhost/127.0.0.1/*.local never count; preview wildcards are one-click exclusions.
• Hostname rules drop excluded traffic at ingestion, before it can count.
• Teams that want staging numbers give staging its own site ID.

Filtered automatically

• localhost, 127.0.0.1, and *.local hostnames never count.
• The dashboard's own verification pings are excluded.
• Known cloud-preview wildcards can be one-click enabled as exclusions (e.g. *.vercel.app, *.netlify.app, *.pages.dev).

Excluding your staging domain

Add a hostname rule under Settings → Exclusions, e.g. staging.example.com or wildcard *.staging.example.com. Rules apply at ingestion, excluded hits are dropped before they ever count.

Or give staging its own site

Teams that want to see staging behavior create a separate free-of-charge site for it on Growth/Scale, real dashboards, zero pollution of production. Same snippet, different data-site per environment via an env var.

Common pitfalls

The mistakes we see most often on this topic, so you can skip them entirely.

• Sharing one site ID across prod and staging 'temporarily'.
• Excluding by IP for a VPN'd team whose IPs rotate, prefer hostname rules.
• Testing on localhost and filing a 'no data' ticket.

Quick reference