Testing changes in your standard sandbox

What's my plan?

Quick Look: Admin Center > Account > Sandbox > Sandboxes

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:

• Creating a standard sandbox
• Working in your standard sandbox
• Replacing your standard sandbox

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

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
2. Click the Create Sandbox button.
3. Enter a Name that describes your sandbox.
4. 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.

Working in your standard sandbox

Once you create your sandbox and it's active, you can start working in it.

Note: If you are using messaging, you may need to take additional steps to include that functionality in your sandbox. See Using messaging in your sandbox.

To open the sandbox from the production instance

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
2. 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.

   

3. Sign in to the sandbox with your normal admin credentials.
4. Make changes, test, and fine-tune.

Important: Changes in standard sandboxes aren't copied to the production instance. Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must reproduce them manually in the production instance.

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

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
2. Beside the name of the sandbox you want to open, click the options menu (), then select Delete Sandbox.

   

3. Create a new sandbox using the steps in Creating a standard sandbox.

   A new sandbox is created with a new URL.