Testing New Facebook Code

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Facebook pushes new code out every week, typically on Tuesday nights, so it's important you test your applications and Facebook Connect implementations to make sure they still function correctly with the new code.

To help you test new Facebook code with your application or implementation, we set up a beta tier, *.beta.facebook.com. Facebook pushes code to the beta tier starting Sunday evenings at 6PM, Pacific time, updating the tier every half hour or hour until the weekly code push starts Tuesday afternoon.

The beta tier is available 24/7 for you to test, but we recommend you start testing code Monday, to give you enough time to test and report any issues you might discover.

We send out a reminder on the Platform Status Feed when the new code is available on the beta tier. It's a good idea to subscribe to the feed, as we use this channel to alert you to any issues happening on Facebook Platform; it's not just for announcing beta tier availability.

Contents

Testing the Code

Follow these steps to test new Facebook code.

  1. Create test user accounts, and test your application or implementation with these users only. Real user accounts (those not designated test accounts) do not work on the beta tier. See Test Accounts for details.
  2. To test calls to the REST-ful API, make your calls to http://api.beta.facebook.com/restserver.php, not http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php.
  3. To test calls to the JavaScript Client Library for Facebook Connect, make the calls to http://static.ak.beta.connect.facebook.com, not http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com.
    Note: For IFrame applications, you should point to the appropriate location from where you load your JavaScript, so you might point to the api.beta.facebook.com tier, or you might point to static.ak.beta.facebook.com.
  4. If you notice any issues impacting your application or implementation, please file a bug.

Testing with Web Debugging Tools

In addition, you can test your front end code (such as JavaScript for Facebook Connect) with Web debugging proxy tools like Charles (if you develop on OS X, Windows, or Linux) or Fiddler (if you develop on Windows exclusively). However, this won't test your back end code.

Testing Notes

  • Your test accounts can be logged out, if you need to test logged out scenarios.
  • Your application doesn't have to be in sandbox mode in order for you to test the code.

Best Practices

It's a good idea for you to maintain a staging area for your code. This way, you won't have to keep changing your production code to point to the beta tier every week. Keep the staging area pointed to the beta tier, so you don't have to keep changing your code.

Known Issues

  • SSL doesn't work on the beta tier currently; we hope to have this fixed soon.
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