A sandbox is a test environment with varying degrees of similarity to your production environment. You can use the sandbox to learn about new features and experiment with new settings without affecting your production environment. Zendesk has two types of sandbox environments: standard and premium. This article describes how to create and use standard sandboxes.
This article contains the following topics:
Support customers who want to replicate information from their production instance, deploy tested triggers and automations to production, or need more than one sandbox at a time, can upgrade to a Zendesk Suite Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan to get Premium Sandbox.
Creating a standard sandbox
To use a standard sandbox, you must initialize it. The sandbox is created with settings from your current production instance of Zendesk Support. Before you initialize your standard sandbox, make sure you're familiar with the key facts about sandboxes and understand what data is and isn't replicated for standard sandboxes.
To create a standard sandbox
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
- Click the Create Sandbox button.
- Enter a Name that describes your sandbox.
- Click Create.
You will see a message that your sandbox is being created. When your sandbox is successfully created, a message appears at the top of the page, and the status of the sandbox becomes Active. The sandbox has a unique URL with a ten-digit number after your domain name.
![](https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/en/ac_account_sandbox_create_3A.png)
Working in your standard sandbox
To open the sandbox from the production instance
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
- Beside the name of the sandbox you want to open, click the options menu (
), then select Open Sandbox to launch the sandbox instance in a new browser tab. You can also bookmark the sandbox and access it from your browser.
- Sign in to the sandbox with your normal admin credentials.
- Make changes, test, and fine-tune.
Replacing your standard sandbox
After you're done with a round of testing and updates, you can create a new sandbox for a fresh round of development and testing. Creating a new sandbox is also useful if you mess up and want to start from scratch.
You can have a single standard sandbox at a time. A typical procedure would be to delete the existing sandbox and create a new one based on the settings of your current production instance of Zendesk Support. See About Zendesk sandbox environments.
If you aren't ready to replace your sandbox, but want it to reflect changes to your Zendesk subscriptions, you can sync product and add-ons.
To replace your sandbox
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
- Beside the name of the sandbox you want to open, click the options menu (
), then select Delete Sandbox.
- Create a new sandbox using the steps in Creating a standard sandbox.
A new sandbox is created with a new URL.
43 comments
Kim Nylander
@... It would be great to see that article you liked to. Unfortunately, I get an error message that says I don't have permission.
Is there any update on being able to deploy from Sandbox to Production?
1
Dave Dyson
Hi Kim –
I've updated the link in Jessie's earlier comment, as it was pointing to an older post that had been archived. Here's where to add your use case: Need functionality to move changes from Sandbox to Production
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Kim Nylander
@... Thank you! Much appreciated.
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Charlie
Hey @..., I don't seem to have permission to view the product feedback page - any idea why?
We're preparing to refresh our sandbox now, and it's a big headache - a refresh option that would refresh business rules and ticket behavior settings without wiping URL, API tokens, OAuth clients, and all of these other things that various testing integrations depend on would really be great.
1
Dave Dyson
Hi Charlie, we often will archive old product feedback threads that haven't had any comments recently. I've un-archived it, so now's your chance! The link should work again.
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Nathania
Our team is using Sandbox to build out a chatbot. We've been able to create an API client in the production environment but when we created a new sandbox the API client is not copied over.
How can we use API in a Sandbox setting? Does the API not copy over or function in Sandbox?
0
Eric Nelson
Hey Nathania,
When you're referring to an 'api client' are you referring to an api token or the ZAFClient?
Appreciate the clarification!
Have a wonderful day!
Eric Nelson | Manager - Developer Advocacy
0
Oscar%20Alberto
Hello! I have an enterprise account and I just created a sandbox. The problem that I saw was that I wasn't able to access to Ticket Fields because that option doesn't appear. I know there are limitations, but if we want to replicate the same ticket structure, how I can do it?
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Rachel Dehoyos
Can I test out the Zendesk community in the standard sandbox?
0
Cheeny Aban
Yes, you can create a Guide community page on your Sandbox account.
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Matt Farrington-Smith
Hi @... - is there any way to stop my fellow Admins receiving an email notification whenever I make changes to the Sandbox or create new test tickets etc?
We are getting spammed A LOT (and I'm sure they are fed up of my updates!)
0
Charles Gresula
Hi Matt Farrington-Smith,
Email notifications for ticket updates are controlled by the triggers.
You can deactivate any triggers that have the action of Email user | assignee or Email group.
0
Eduardo Escobar
Hello, I'm not seeing the "Sandbox" option in the admin site. Is there something I'm missing?
0
Dave Dyson
The Standard Sandbox is available on the Support Enterprise plan (see the graphic at the top of this article) – here's information on upgrading: Viewing and managing plan subscriptions
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Jahn
I am trying to add Sandbox for our company and apparently it won't allow me and getting the below error for some reason.
Tried Clearing Cache
Tried Rebooting my device and internet
Tried different browser but to no success
Anyone that can help please?
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Brett Bowser
That sounds like a potential bug and it looks like you have a ticket open with our Customer Care team to troubleshoot further.
They'll follow up with you shortly to get this all figured out :)
0
Jahn
Thank you Brett Bowser. Hope they can identify the issue and implement a fix on this the soonest time.
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Rebeca
Hello!
When I'm in our Sandbox and I try to go to Guide, I get the error message that the page doesn't exist and that my account owner needs to enable it.
Our Help Center is live and available for end users.
But the developers we work with need access to the "test environment" for the guide to work on something.
Also, if we create a Sandbox for the guide, is it a separate one or is the same as for Zendesk Support?
Thanks!
0
Brett Bowser
Since your Sandbox is considered its own separate account, you'd still need to activate Guide there before anyone can have access to it. So if you're the Sandbox account owner you'd need to navigate to the Guide>Guide Admin>Settings and activate it from there. Otherwise you'll need to contact the Account Owner of the Sandbox account and have them activate it for you.
Let me know if this doesn't make sense or if you have any other questions!
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Rich Andersen
Hi,
How can I send emails to and from the sandbox to test templates, signatures, triggers, etc?
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Jahn
Rich Andersen - go to admin centre>channels>email then you will be able to see your Sandbox test email address.
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Rich Andersen
Thanks Jahn, I was able to send a test emails TO my sandbox but I'm not receiving emails FROM my sandbox. Any idea why?
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Jahn
Do you already set up a view to see those new tickets?
You can also search for the name of the sender in Sandbox to see the ticket manually
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Onoff Telecom
I have been trying to create a sandbox in order to test somethings regarding Zendesk sell:
![](/hc/user_images/siQgjaAlgexJDS2C61X88A.png)
![](/hc/user_images/nds6rL1NcDxRFkdujjoQbQ.png)
All seems to be working fine until I try to access the sell at https://app.futuresimple.com/dashboards.main
This triggers a redirection to https://app.futuresimple.com/payments/reactivation and I am not able to do anything there.
If I follow the link to reactivate I end up in subscriptions where it tells me that all seems to be fine for my sandbox:
Any idea of what I could do to be able to actually get to use my Zendesk Sell in this sandbox?
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Freyja
Hello! Is there a way to export your work from Sandbox to, for example, a .csv file?
I' m asking because I'm setting the new bots using the flow builder and it would be nice to share it with my colleagues without providing them with my login data.
Thanks!
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Dane
You'll need to contact us directly so we can check if we can sync it on your account or if there's an underlying cause on this behavior.
Hi Federica,
As of the moment, there's no option to export it or share it on other accounts.
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Damara Allen
I am a ZD admin and another team at our company wants access to the ZD sandbox to test out a new feature that will generate ZD tickets - is it possible to provide sandbox access to someone else who isn't an admin? Can't seem to find any instructions for this.
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Rich Andersen
Hi,
How do I preview changes made in the sandbox?
I've made a change and want to see how it looks in the Help Centre to see if it's working properly.
0
Jahn
Rich Andersen - might want to check out this article on how to preview help centre.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845893274-Previewing-your-help-center-theme
0
Jahn
Damara Allen - pretty much the same process on how to provision access in Live Environment. Only difference is you need to edit their email address as it will be probably the default (sample) email address in Sandbox.
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