Environment Management

Production vs Sandbox

Saleor Cloud provides two types of environments: Sandbox (for development and testing) and Production (for live stores). While they may look similar at first glance, they behave differently in important ways.

Unlike Sandboxes, the Production environment doesn't have limitations on rate limiting and resource usage, such as orders, API requests, products, etc.

The limits imposed on sandboxes are displayed in the Cloud Console.

Key Differences

Feature / Capability	Sandbox Environment	Production Environment
Purpose	Development, testing, demos	Running live, customer-facing storefronts
ToS / Legal	May not be used for production commerce	Fully supported for real transactions
Rate limits	Free plan 120 requests/min Paid plan 2,000 requests/min	No enforced request limit
Upgrades	Free plan sandboxes auto-upgrade to the latest minor version Paid plan sandboxes are upgraded manually - you have full control over when	Production environments are upgraded manually - you have full control over when
Snapshots / Backups	On demand, triggered by cloud users	Automatic daily snapshots
Support	Limited	Depending on plan
SLA	No SLA	See SLA terms
“Promote” action	Promotes sandbox → production. Downtime expected (~5 minutes during database restore)
Selling products	Not allowed under ToS – sandbox is for testing only	Fully supported for commerce

What happens when you click Promote?

Your sandbox environment is promoted to production.

The process introduces temporary downtime (typically ~5 minutes).

After promotion, the environment gains all production-only benefits: SLAs, backups, higher limits, and legal allowance to process real orders.

warning

While it is technically possible to process orders in a sandbox, this is not supported, not backed by SLAs, and violates the Terms of Service. If something breaks, Saleor cannot guarantee support until you upgrade to production.

Accessing your environment

Dashboard access

From the environment page in the Saleor Cloud, you can quickly access the dashboard for that specific environment. Click the Go to Dashboard button to be automatically logged in via Single Sign-On (SSO).

API access

You can access the GraphQL API Playground directly from the environment page by clicking the Go to Playground button. This allows you to interact with your environment's API.

To learn more, see the GraphQL API overview.

Snapshots

Database snapshots can be created and replicated from any sandbox or production environment, allowing staging environments to be created.

info

Production environments automatically create daily snapshots, which are retained for 7 days.

This feature enables productive workflows for development and testing, for example:

• Replicating the latest production data to a staging environment.
• Creating integration tests. You can create snapshots that would be used as a starting point for integration tests.
• Migration scripts. During the development of migration scripts, it might be desirable to do it in steps, where each successful step can be saved and reverted during the development of the next step.

Follow the quickstart guide to learn how to use snapshots.

Restoring deleted environments

If your environment has been automatically deleted due to inactivity, you can restore it from a snapshot within 7 days. Final snapshot is created automatically before deletion. You don't need to contact support to restore your environment - you can do it yourself by following these steps:

1. Go to the cloud project and click New Sandbox.
2. Fill the form you can set the same sandbox domain as before.
3. In the database section select Use snapshot option.
4. Choose the snapshot with final in name (this is the backup created before the environment was deleted).

note

Snapshots from deleted environments are retained for 7 days.

Version upgrades

Saleor versions can be upgraded on demand via the console. Sequential upgrades (from one minor to the next minor) are backward compatible and do not require downtime. Thus, upgrades are never disruptive.

Each environment has independent version management, thus making it possible to test new features before production upgrades.

note

Projects without a production environment (aka free projects) automatically upgrade to the latest version. To disable automatic version upgrades of sandboxes, you would need to have a production instance in the same project.

Access Control

To control Trusted client origins and Allowed API origins, see the guide for API access restriction.

Subdomain Management

Subdomains of your environments (e.g., [your_subdomain].saleor.cloud) can be changed of your instance on demand via console.