Using public domains with a Frontastic sandbox

When creating a new Frontastic sandbox you can decide if it will receive public domain name entries. This allows you to access the projects running on the sandbox directly from any web browser without the need for local developer tooling, such as Frontastic CLI. This can be useful to:

• Show a certain feature (which only exists in a branch) to non-technical users
• Work with code that strictly requires HTTPS connection (such as payment integrations)
• Preview a certain production build without deploying it to your staging environment
• Run automated tests towards a certain state of your code

In order to create a sandbox with public project domains, you'll need to tick the Add public DNS option:

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You can't edit an existing sandbox, you'll need to create a new one on the same branch.

Once your sandbox is running, you'll see the See public URLs button as well as the Public icon on your sandbox:

This allows you to easily identify which sandboxes are available directly on the web.

If you click the See public URLs button, a pop-up will open and you can open or copy the URLs using the icons and anyone who has the URL can access them.

You can access your projects on it directly from the web using the URL scheme https://<project>-<sandbox-label>-<customer>.frontastic.dev.

Using our branch selection feature you can bring up a certain code branch directly without the need to enable code-synchronization from your local computer.

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We recommend that, as an Engineer, you check the correct working of a sandbox brought up from a branch before handing it to a non-technical person. This can prevent small annoyances such as not-running webpack processes or missed code-pushes.

If you're seeing a “connection is not secure” message in your browser, it means our SSL certificate has been updated but you're using a sandbox created before this update and it has the old certificate. To fix this, destroy your sandbox and create a new one. If you destroy your sandbox every day (as is recommended) you shouldn't see this issue.