What are sandboxes?

A sandbox is an isolated environment where you can experiment and test changes before making them in production. Every sandbox works like a replica of your production instance – it’s connected to it, has a similar URL, and includes either all or a subset of its data, depending on what you copy.

Multiple sandboxes for different kinds of changes Beta

We’ve launched an Open Beta that allows you to create multiple sandboxes for a single product instance. Thanks to that, you can create different testing environments for different kinds of changes, for example:

• App testing sandbox

• New features sandbox

• Migration sandbox

You can also combine multiple eligible products from your production site under common sandbox sites that serve the same testing purpose. For example, instead of separating your Jira and Confluence into separate sites, you can add both of them to your App testing sandbox site, just like in their original setup.

Available sandboxes and limits

Every Enterprise plan entitles you to 10 sandboxes – you can use them for a single production site or spread your limit across more production sites to give testing environments to different teams.

How multiple sandboxes work

You can find all important details in:

Open Beta: Multiple sandboxes

Sandboxes and different plans

The number of available sandboxes depends on your plan:

• Premium plan: You can create one sandbox. So, you get a single testing environment for the selected production instance.

• Enterprise plan: You can create multiple sandboxes. This means that a single production instance can have multiple testing environments for different kinds of changes, for example development, staging, or User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

If you have multiple Premium or Enterprise plans, like Jira Enterprise and Confluence Enterprise, it’s important to understand additional limits and how you can distribute or combine sandboxes across your site. For details, see Sandbox limits.

Sandbox sites and sandboxes

When you create a new sandbox, you always choose:

• Source production site so we can create a mapping.

• New name so we can create a new URL, like dev-atlassian.com.

• Product you want to create a sandbox for.

As a result, you really create a sandbox site (dev-atlassian.com) with 1 sandbox in it. This division into sandbox sites and sandboxes makes it easier for us to recreate the backbone of your production site, and organize your sandboxes.

Sandboxes and their content

Here is some information about the contents of sandboxes.

Data and configuration items

After you create a sandbox, you choose what data you want to copy to it from the production instance. You can copy all data or only a subset, depending on what you need to test. Some data types or configuration items can’t be copied to a sandbox. What data is copied to sandboxes

User limits

Sandboxes have the same user limits as their linked production environments.

Performance and data retention

Because your sandbox is not a production environment, we don’t guarantee sandbox data retention if it is destroyed. Your sandbox will not be covered by the SLAs that cover products. For these reasons, we recommend not using a sandbox as the sole location of your data.

Marketplace apps

Atlassian Marketplace apps with a paid subscription on a linked production environment can be added to a sandbox for free. More about managing apps in a sandbox. Manage apps for sandboxes

Sandboxes for testing a migration

While the sandboxes are primarily used to test Atlassian product changes, you can also create a sandbox to test a migration from server to cloud. Sandboxes can be easily deleted and recreated, and any change made within a sandbox won’t affect production.

To test a migration using a sandbox use the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant or Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant.

We recommend that if you want to test your server import multiple times, delete and recreate your sandbox. We don’t recommend testing multiple import files at the same time, as it's likely to not work.

Get started with sandboxes

To get started with sandboxes:

1. Go to admin.atlassian.com, and select your organization.

2. Go to Products > Sandbox.

3. Create your first sandbox.

How to create a sandbox