Bringing up a Frontastic sandbox

To work on the backend-for-frontend of your project, you'll need a Frontastic sandbox and the Frontastic CLI for code synchronization. This article will cover how to bring up a Frontastic sandbox in the Frontastic studio, you can use the Read next section for more information on Frontastic sandboxes.

Before we start

Firstly, make sure you've got your credentials to your Frontastic account.

Then, you'll need a local checkout of your Frontastic project on GitHub. This needs to be a fresh checkout, otherwise, you might run into issues.

And lastly, you need to make sure you have installed the Frontastic CLI.

Once you've done that, you're now ready to bring up a Frontastic sandbox.

Bringing up a Frontastic sandbox

1. Log in to your project in the Frontastic studio (for example, <customer>.frontastic.io)

2. Click on Developer then Sandboxes

3. Click the Add sandbox button on the top right of the screen

4. Input a Label (must only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes), then select the branch which has the desired backend features you want to work on (it'll default to your master branch if you leave it empty), tick if you want to create public project domains with the sandbox, and then click Create

📘

Ticking Add public DNS means you can share a URL for a project running on a sandbox with someone in the business team to review the work in progress. See the using public domains in a Frontastic sandbox article for more information.

Your sandbox will then start booting, which might take as long as 20 minutes to boot for the first time. You'll see the initial information (like in the image below) but you won't have the SSH data included at this stage.

📘

The branch you select in the setup is only used for initial provisioning and doesn't have any subsequent effects. You can safely switch branches while synchronizing. We also don't use the branch for any subsequent boots.

Once the sandbox has booted successfully, you can inspect essential details about your Frontastic sandbox:

Now, you can open the root folder of your project checkout and run frontastic init. This is how you'll sync your files from your sandbox. We'll go through how to do this in the Frontastic CLI and Frontastic sandbox article.