Introduction

The Astrada sandbox is a separate environment for integration testing: its own hosts, its own credentials, and synthetic data everywhere. Nothing you do here reaches a card network, a bank, or production data. Cards enroll from reserved test-card pools, bank links complete against the providers' test banks, and transactions come from simulation endpoints.

You get sandbox credentials (an accountId and an OAuth2 client) during onboarding. They are separate from your production credentials and only work against the sandbox hosts.

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Sandbox environment vs sandbox mode

This section covers the standalone sandbox environment. There is also sandbox mode, a per-subaccount flag on the production API for deterministic 3DS testing with known test cards, documented in Test Cards & Sandbox Testing. If you are choosing where to start integration testing, start here.

Get a token

Authentication works exactly like production: an OAuth2 client-credentials grant against your account's realm, on the sandbox host.

curl -X POST "https://api.sandbox.astrada.co/auth/realms/{accountId}/protocol/openid-connect/token" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
  -d "grant_type=client_credentials" \
  -d "client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID" \
  -d "client_secret=YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET"

Response (200 OK):

{
  "access_token": "eyJhbGciOi...",
  "expires_in": 300,
  "token_type": "Bearer"
}

The token carries your client's scopes. The read and write scopes match production; the simulation endpoints additionally require simulation:write, which sandbox clients have by default.

What works and what is excluded

Subaccounts, cards, card subscriptions, transactions, transaction messages, webhooks, network bulk feeds, and bank linking all work as documented in the API reference, served from the sandbox base URL. Excluded: single card enrollment (3DS card verification), enrollment methods, and BIN lookup. For 3DS testing use sandbox mode on production instead.

In this section

• Testing Bank Linking walks the bank rail end to end: create a link with the API or the SDK, complete it against a test bank, read the created resources, pull transactions, and reconcile a simulated card transaction.
• Testing Bulk Enrollment walks the bulk rail: create a network bulk feed, drive a synthetic ingestion, and watch cards and transactions appear.
• Sandbox API Reference is the endpoint reference for the simulation endpoints, with Test Card Pools underneath it.

Next steps

• Testing Bank Linking: start with the bank rail.
• Testing Bulk Enrollment: start with the bulk rail.
• Webhook Event Types: the canonical event catalog.