Using sandboxes
You can use Sandboxes in the Developer area to create and manage your sandboxes in the studio.
Once open, you'll see any sandboxes you've already created first, followed by the sandboxes that've been created by others in your project (by default this is collapsed).
Use the search to look for a particular sandbox (it's based on the name of the sandbox).
For how to work with sandboxes, see the sandboxes article.
Creating a sandbox
To create a sandbox, follow the steps below.
- Click Add sandbox.
- Input a Label (must only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes).
- Input the Branch which has the desired backend features you want to work on (it'll default to your
master
branch if left empty).
The Add public DNS option is automatically selected. You can't clear this.
- Click Create.
Your sandbox will then be brought up. This will take less than 10 minutes.
Halting a sandbox
Once you've finished working, you can Halt or Destroy your sandbox using the corresponding buttons:
If you halt your sandbox, you can bring it up again when you want to by clicking the Bring up button:
You should regularly destroy your sandbox and then create a new one. It's actually a good idea to destroy the sandbox when you finish work and create a new one the next day to avoid issues.
Public sandbox
All sandboxes are created with public DNS enabled. This allows you to access the projects running on the sandbox directly from any web browser without the need for local developer tooling, such as CLI. This can be useful to:
- Show a certain feature (which only exists in a branch) to non-technical users
- Work with code that strictly requires HTTPS connection (such as payment extensions)
- Preview a certain production build without deploying it to your staging environment
- Run automated tests towards a certain state of your code
Once a sandbox is running, you can click the See public URLs button to access the list of URLs for your sandbox.
You can then click the open icon to open the URL. Or the copy icon to copy the URL for you to share with your team.
Sandbox statuses
A sandbox can have the following 5 statuses:
Transient
— appears grayed out, the sandbox is being brought up, and you can't use it for development yet.Running
— everything is working correctly and you can use this sandbox for your development.Halted
— the sandbox was halted by clicking Halt, you can use it again by clicking Bring up.Debuggable
— the sandbox encountered an error and you can't use it for development. You can use the sandbox to find what triggered the error.Errored
— the sandbox encountered an error and you can't use it.
For both the Debuggable and Errored states, you'll see a bug icon like the below:
If you click this icon, you'll open the logs where you can look into the components that failed to initialize. The failed components should already be expanded, or you can use the + icon to expand a component section and look into the issues.
Sandbox notifications
We recommend destroying your sandbox once you've finished work for the day. And then bring up a new one the next day. This is because out-of-date sandboxes can cause a lot of issues. Because of this, you'll see a warning notification when your sandbox is more than 3 days old:
You can continue working on this sandbox if you want to, but if you run into any errors, you should destroy the sandbox and create a new one to see if the issue still occurs.