Using the Sandbox

The Sandbox is a special version of the ALANA Platform created for developers to explore the SDK without committing to a full membership, or to develop their web sites or applications in a safe and secure place. It is isolated from both the development and production environments, meaning that anything you create within the Sandbox won't be accessible from outside it.

Features

This isolation is the main feature of the Sandbox, and the primary reason why you would want to use it. In addition, the Sandbox is designed to allow for testing on the stable version of the SDK, not the development version, so you're working closer to what you would see once you take your site or app live.

Limitations

The Sandbox is not intended to be used as a substitute for a production site. It has a few limitations that aren't present once you decide to build your site on the ALANA Platform:

• You can't accept real money for memberships, experiences, products, or services.

• All email notifications are disabled.

• Email verification is disabled. New accounts you create must still enter a 6-digit verification code, but it is not checked for validity.

• The Sandbox environment will occasionally be reset by the ALANA team, removing existing data for your business.

Accessing the Sandbox

Accessing the Sandbox is relatively simple. From your Dashboard or the Alana4 Pricing page, you can create a new Sandbox user. You will receive the same combination of public key, secret key, and API username as if you were creating a new business on the ALANA Platform.

When creating an API instance in code, such as in the Getting Started page of the tutorial, you'll need to pass "sandbox" as the value for the mode property, instead of "development" or "production".

And that's it! That's the only configuration needed to switch environments. When you're ready to go live, you'll change that same line to "production".