Creating a Sandbox
How to create and manage a sandbox environment in Formance Platform.
Sandboxes are fully functional Formance Platform development instances that you can use in the design and test phase of your applications. Sandboxes are free and available to all users.
Sandbox environments are not suitable for production use, and intended testing purposes only. Data persistence is not guaranteed, and data may be lost at any time without prior notice. They also enter a sleep mode after a prolonged period of inactivity, which can result in a longer startup time. If you need a production-ready managed cloud environment, please checkout the Production Cloud section.
Prerequisites
- Having installed the Formance CLI on your machine
- Having authenticated fctl against a Formance Cloud account
Creating a Sandbox
Let’s create a Cloud sandbox:
Sandboxes are available for 15 days after their creation. After this period, they are automatically disabled and then completely deleted after 30 days. If you wish to keep your sandbox after it has been disabled, you can request its restoration.
You’ll be prompted to select a region for your stack named playground
. While multiple regions are available, you will need to select one ending with -sandbox
in order to create a free sandbox type stack.
Make sure to let the command a few seconds to complete: this will create and provision a sandbox deployment in your account, and your local fctl will be automatically authorized against it.
You can now check that your sandbox was created successfully by running the following command:
Enable/Disable modules to your Sandbox
By default, a stack is composed of modules:
- Ledger
- Gateway
- Payments
- Auth
- Stargate
You can enable/disable any modules with:
Obtain available modules
Depending on the region you are using, you can obtain the list of available modules under Capabilities > MODULE_LIST
with:
Using your Sandbox
Now that you have a sandbox ready to be fiddled with, you can use it freely for test and development. The Formance CLI ships with a number of commands that you can use to interact with your sandbox from your terminal: