Here are some helpful suggestions to ensure that Freedom and your software development environment work properly side-by-side.
Technical information
On the desktop, Freedom utilizes a local proxy to filter the content you've selected. We use this approach because it gives us a good balance of speed, flexibility (wildcard support, etc.), and privacy protection (does not require elevated permissions, and blocking is completely contained to the machine). The Freedom proxy runs on port 7769, and uses compiled regular expressions for real-time pass/no-pass decisions.
Proxy Interactions with Development Environments
The primary issue we see with local development environments is an incompatibility with local proxy. That is, a local development tool is unable to, or unhappy with running through the proxy. Generally, these issues can be resolved by enabling the tool to run through a proxy (sometimes a command flag) or by bypassing the local proxy.
Local Proxy Bypass
If you're running a development server on localhost, you can configure windows so that traffic to localhost does not go through the proxy. Enable this from Internet Settings -> LAN Settings -> Bypass proxy server for local addresses. Here's a doc that has more information.
Interactions with Specific Products
Some specific solutions for interactions with development tools. If you've run into an issue with Freedom and a development tool, please let us know so we can attempt to identify a solution.
VPN Services
It is fairly commonplace for developers to use a VPN service for traffic testing, etc. If you are using a browser-based VPN, please install our Freedom browser extensions to ensure that Freedom can continue to block websites as intended.