Cloud Publish

What Cloud Publish is

Cloud Publish temporarily exposes the mock rules you create in Mimicry to the outside of your Mac's local network. Through a public URL issued with one click, real devices outside your LAN, external beta testers, and CI environments can access the mock server directly. You can start using it right away on the free tier, without a license key.

Normally Mimicry runs locally on your own Mac as a proxy, but with this feature you can temporarily upload your mock rules to a cloud server operated by the developer and make them accessible over the internet. It is useful in cases like the following.

• When the API is not yet implemented and you want to hand out only the app so people can verify its behavior
• When you want external beta testers outside your corporate LAN to try a mock API that returns fixed responses
• When you want to reach the mock from a CI environment (such as GitHub Actions) without going through the local proxy on your Mac

Free tier and paid tier

Even without registering a license key, you can use Cloud Publish within the following limits as the free tier. If you want to publish more projects at once, extend the publication period, or publish on your own domain, add a license key.

While publishing on the free tier, the publication screen shows your current access volume (usage per hour), so you can check at any time how close you are to the limit.

Adding a license key does not automatically switch projects that were already published to the paid tier. Once you disable a publication and publish it again, it is published on the paid tier.

How to publish

What you can do while published

Even after publishing once, you can update the settings and content without stopping the publication. In every one of these operations, the public URL and the remaining publication period are kept as-is.

• Redeploy mock rules — If you add or change rules locally after publishing, a badge shows that there is a difference from the published content. You can apply the latest rules with a single "Update" button, without having to disable and republish.
• Change the allowed IP addresses (paid tier only) — You can add or remove the IP addresses allowed to access without stopping the publication.
• Extend the publication period — When the expiration approaches, a warning appears, and you can reset the publication period with the "Extend" button. Since the URL does not change, links you have already shared keep working.

Custom domain (paid tier only)

If you have registered a license key, you can serve the public URL on a domain you own (for example, mock.example.com). Just enter the domain name when publishing and add the CNAME record you are guided to your DNS, and certificate issuance is handled automatically as well.

This is handy when you want to switch the app's connection destination without rebuilding, or when you want to hand testers an easy-to-remember URL. The custom domain is released when you disable the publication.

Access restriction (paid tier only)

The public URL contains a hard-to-guess token, but on the paid tier with a license key registered, you can additionally specify the IP addresses to allow in advance. If you specify IP addresses, access from anywhere else is denied. Use this when you want to publish restricted to only your corporate network or specific CI runner IPs. In addition to single IPv4 / IPv6 addresses, range specification with CIDR notation is also supported. This feature is not available on the free tier (it is published without any specification).

Cloud CI such as GitHub Actions has dynamic IP addresses, so IP restriction alone may not be enough to narrow it down. For such cases, the paid tier also offers authentication with an access token (a shared secret). Issue a token from the publishing screen, and just by adding an X-Mimicry-Access-Token: <token> header to the request, you can allow access regardless of the source IP (it is a dedicated header that does not conflict with the Authorization header that the app under test may also use for the real API). It can be combined with the IP allowlist, and access goes through if either condition is met. The token is shown only once when issued and cannot be shown again afterward (reissuing and disabling are possible at any time).

Managing publications and expiration

You can manually stop (disable) a publication at any time. Even if you do not stop it manually, it automatically expires after 24 hours on the free tier and after 7 days on the paid tier (with a license key registered), and the URL becomes inaccessible.

If you have registered a license key, you can publish multiple projects at once with a single key, and you can check at any time which projects are published and what publication history there has been from the list screen in the app (free-tier publications appear in this list as "Published" but are not kept in the history). The list screen also has a Disable all button, so if you ever have concerns about how a license key is being handled, you can stop all published projects at once.

The same license key can be registered on multiple Macs, and the publication state is shared per key. You can also republish the same project from another Mac or check the list of active publications.

If you try to delete a currently published project in Mimicry, the cloud-side publication is stopped as well (on the paid tier, since it may also be used from other Macs, a confirmation dialog asks whether it is okay to stop it).