Polar User Test Mode/Sandbox Environment Control

[coopbri]

Currently, Polar users have to use the official, shared, single-tenant sandbox test environment hosted at https://sandbox.polar.sh. This is great (and thank you Polar team for hosting this), but it would be ideal to allow isolated "test mode" products (or our own test "environments") that we as users could control ourselves. It would be nice to e.g. be able to create our own development environments like Clerk allows, or allow setting products to a "draft/test" status like Shopify allows with its product statuses.

Stripe reference: https://docs.stripe.com/test-mode

This allows us to have more control over our testing flows, and enable industry-standard use cases such as ephemeral environments.

Alternatively, users can mock requests e.g. using https://mswjs.io, but it would be great to support this isolated testing more natively.

[frankie567]

I'm not sure I understand the use-case you describe here 🤔

What those isolated environments would enable you to do that the sandbox can't? You can use the Sandbox anyway you want, including scripting with the API.

[coopbri]

Thanks for the reply! The sandbox is awesome for general testing, but isolated test environments would let us spin up separate, disposable setups for specific scenarios such as testing API integrations, UI flows, or ephemeral environments without affecting shared sandbox data. It’s about having more granular control and avoiding potential conflicts in a single-tenant setup, let alone having to rely on Polar's test infrastructure for our CI/CD and beyond. Mocking works, but native support would streamline our workflows (especially E2E).

EDIT: also, having to manually enter the same user data and configuration across two deployments (sandbox and production) leaves room for drift and reduced dev/prod parity. This can be streamlined with the API/IaC though.

[birkjernstrom]

You can achieve all of this though by creating dedicated organizations/account in the sandbox environment.

Otherwise, it sounds like you're looking for a fully self-hosted solution? Unfortunately, it's not something we officially support or document even though it's possible - as such a setup would defeat the ability for us to act as MoR.

[coopbri]

No worries, makes sense on the product front. The main thing would also be drift. It would be nice to have a single source of truth for Polar products (like the Stripe and Shopify examples), instead of having to duplicate and track 2 places for everything. Just gets tedious, automatable with API so will go that route for now