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Each instance has two environments.
  • production - The environment intended for use within your live app.
  • sandbox - The environment intended for use by developers to test transactions and within your test or quality assurance systems.
These two environments have separate infrastructures so resources such as buyers and payment services are not shared between them. This also means that there are different hostnames for sandbox and production APIs and dashboards. The hostnames for the APIs are as follows:
EnvironmentHostname
sandboxapi.sandbox.{instance_id}.gr4vy.app
productionapi.{instance_id}.gr4vy.app
The instance ID is the unique identifier for the deployment of the system and is included in every API call. Together with the environment (sandbox or production) it is used to connect to the right APIs, as well as dashboard.
Test payment services, card rules, and other settings in the sandbox environment, before migrating them to the production environment.

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Why environments?

Environments are an essential part of any development process. A developer might run the app on their development machine, and to try and test the integration they might want to try and create some payments. To stop the dashboard from being populated with lots of testing data it would be best for the developer to create their test transactions against the sandbox environment instead. Similarly, running either automated or manual tests against the API as part of QA and testing is common. To stop this from interfering with live environments, set these tests to run against the sandbox environment.

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Environments and payment service APIs

The environment determines which payment service API environment should connect to. For example, Braintree transactions made in the sandbox environment are processed by the Braintree sandbox environment, while transactions made in the production environment are processed by the Braintree live environment. Other actions such as registering a digital wallet are also dependent on the environment. Apple Pay digital wallets registered using the sandbox environment are registered with Apple Pay’s sandbox environment. This wallet is not recognized by Apple Pay’s live environment and thus cannot be used in production. In short, the production environment always connects to the live API of a payment service, whereas the sandbox environment always connects to its sandbox API.