To develop the backend of your site with Frontastic (or if you're using Windows), you'll need to use a Frontastic sandboxFrontastic sandbox - A virtual machine hosted in the cloud that you can use for backend and some frontend development. They're provisioned from the developer area of the Frontastic studio.. In the Frontastic studioFrontastic studio - The interface you use to manage, build, and edit all areas of your project and commerce sites. Previously known as `backstage`., you'll find sandbox management (click Developer, then Sandbox).

When you click Sandbox, you'll see all the sandboxes that are associated with your project.

You have 3 main action buttons on a sandbox that already exists: Halt, Destroy, and Bring up.

If your Frontastic sandboxFrontastic sandbox - A virtual machine hosted in the cloud that you can use for backend and some frontend development. They're provisioned from the developer area of the Frontastic studio. is running, you can click Halt to stop your sandbox temporarily. If you do this, the Bring up button will then be available and you can click this to start your sandbox running again. To stop your sandbox entirely, click the Destroy button. This can also help if you're having any issues with your sandbox.

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Tip

Destroy your sandbox at the end of each day to minimize issues.

Add new sandbox

To create a brand new sandbox, click the blue add icon:

Then add a label for your sandbox (only use lower case letters, numbers, and dashes), add a branch if you want to (you can also leave this empty), and click Create:

Sandbox states

There are 4 states a sandbox can be in:

• Running – everything is working normally and you can use this sandbox for your development
• Halted – someone has pressed the Halt button, you can only use this sandbox if you press the Bring up button
• Debuggable – the sandbox has errored and you can't use this sandbox for development, but you can use it to find out why it errored
• Errored – the sandbox has fatally errored and you can't use this sandbox at all

For both the Debuggable and Errored states, you'll see a bug icon like the below:

If you click on this icon, you'll open the logs where you can look into the components that failed to initialize. The components that failed should already be expanded, or you can use the + icon to expand a component section and look into the issues.