Environments and sandbox

Billing mistakes are expensive, so keep environments apart. Orvlin workspaces start in sandbox, where payments never reach a real processor and test clocks are available.

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Recommended setup

Give each environment its own keys. A revoked staging key then can’t affect production.

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What sandbox does

• Payments never reach a real payment processor, even if one is connected.
• Test clocks can move customers’ time forward to test renewals and retries.
• Data is kept apart from live customers.

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Promote a change

Change the catalog in sandbox first, then apply the same change to live:

1. Make the change in sandbox, for example a new price or a plan version.
2. Run through it with a test clock: see Test billing with test clocks.
3. If you manage the catalog as code, deploy the same pricing manifest to live with orvlin deploy --dry-run first, then without it.
4. Check the live plan and price in the dashboard before you route customers to it.

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Checking which environment you’re in

Use the health endpoint and your own configuration to show the environment in your logs, so an engineer can tell at a glance which workspace a request went to.