New and Improved Sandbox

Developers building on the Square platform now have a powerful new tool available to help them more quickly build, test, and deploy their omnichannel integrations. We’re thrilled to announce a brand-new version of our Sandbox, now available in beta.

In talking with developers looking to build applications for Square sellers, we heard three consistent themes of how we could improve the Sandbox experience: full coverage of Connect v2 APIs, the ability to quickly create testing accounts to simulate Square seller actions, and a way to view transactions created in Sandbox. These jobs-to-be-done became the foundational cornerstones for our new Sandbox.

Full coverage of Connect v2 APIs

The first version of our Sandbox brought support for many popular APIs (Transactions, Checkout, Customers, and Locations). However, support for our Catalog, Inventory, Employees, Labor, and Orders APIs was lacking, forcing developers of multi-API integrations to resort to testing integrations against our production APIs.

Our new Sandbox has support for most Connect v2 APIs, and we’ll continue to add support through the beta period. This means that a developer building an order-ahead application for Square sellers can build and test their integration with Payments, Orders, Catalog, and Inventory entirely within our Sandbox environment, and move to production when ready.

curl -X POST \
  https://connect.squareupsandbox.com/v2/catalog/object \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN' \
  -d '{
  "idempotency_key": "d2667644-8775-4573-a030-cf91fc87329c",
  "object": {
    "type": "ITEM",
    "id": "#Coffee",
    "item_data": {
      "name": "Coffee",
      "description": "Hot coffee",
      "abbreviation": "Cof"
    }
  }
}'

Additionally, we’ve introduced full support for Connect API Versioning in the new Sandbox. Developers needing to update to a later API version can use Sandbox versioning to test new functionality without risking their production application.

Seller Test Accounts

Our mission is to enable the success of developers building integrations for Square sellers. To that end, developers have told us they want a clear understanding of the Square seller experience so that they can build remarkable applications for them.

To help bring this understanding to developers, we’ve introduced Test Account functionality in the new Sandbox. A Test Account simulates a Square seller. Developers can use Test Accounts to test OAuth functionality, or test integrating with sellers in multiple countries.

Dashboard view of Sandbox transactions

The most requested feature we heard from developers was the ability to view Sandbox transactions in the Seller Dashboard. With the new Sandbox, each Test Account has its own Sandbox Seller Dashboard. Here, developers can view API-based actions for payments, customers, or inventory. Clicking the Launch button in the Developer Dashboard launches the Sandbox Dashboard for the corresponding Test Account.

Availability

The new Sandbox is available in public beta for all new and existing developers in all countries. Not all products are yet available in the new Sandbox, including Reader SDK, Webhooks, and digital wallet support. But we’ll be continuing to build out additional functionality in the coming months.

Read more details and how to get started in our docs. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback in our developer community!