How to set up a sandbox (stage, test) environment to check your communication scenarios

Here is the flow for setting up the sandbox environment to test your communication scenarios.

1. Create a new separate project in your Pushwoosh account and name it accordingly (like, AppName Sandbox/DEV/Stage/Test);

2. Ask your iOS/Android/Web developers to connect messaging services to this new project. It's needed to establish the connection between the sandbox project and notification services across different platforms that you have on production environment:

• iOS configuration — configure the iOS platform with the Sandbox gateway (token-based configuration with a .p8 Auth Key is recommended; certificate-based also works);
• Android FCM configuration — create the new FCM project, as mentioned at step 1 and follow the rest of steps;
• Web Push configuration, if you would like to test Web Pushes. It is highly recommended to have the separate sandbox website version on your side for safe testing.

3. Ask your mobile developers to create the sandbox application builds for iOS and Android. Those should have the Pushwoosh Application Code of your sandbox project created at Step 1 (iOS and Android), plus the sandbox project's Device API Token, and the sandbox google-services.json (for Android only) obtained during the Android configuration at Step 2.

All these credentials should be different from the ones that you have for the production app.

• For iOS, the Pushwoosh Application Code should be specified in the info.plist file;
• For Android, the Pushwoosh Application Code and Device API Token are specified in AndroidManifest.xml as the com.pushwoosh.appid and com.pushwoosh.apitoken meta-data keys. There is no Sender ID key — FCM registration is driven by the google-services.json file you add to the app module.

When it’s done, install these app builds on a few in-house devices. For testing Web pushes, your web developers will need to integrate our Web Push SDK to the sandbox website version mentioned in p.2.

4. For your sandbox project in Pushwoosh, create the same Events list as you have for the production project, along with their attributes. Also, please prepare the required content templates (Push Presets) that will be used in your communication scenarios.

It is not needed to repeatedly create required Tags for segmentation, those will be automatically populated in Pushwoosh for the new sandbox project;

5. Test notifications:

• Try sending some regular push notifications to the new sandbox project from the Pushwoosh UI in a same manner as you do with your production one — to ensure that all previous steps were completed successfully.
• Create the required Customer Journey campaigns. Launch these Journey campaigns and track their performance.

As a result, you will be able to test some changes and hypotheses, as well as experiment with communication in a completely isolated environment.