For every application that you create on the appacitive platform, there are 2 isolated application deployments that are generated -

  • Sandbox environment
  • Live environment

For all practical purposes, you can treat the two environments as two isolated instances of your app on the server side.

This allows for you to ensure that you can test our changes and enhancements to your app without impacting customers

who are using your live app. The typical application workflow is as follows:


  1. Create or update data model on the sandbox environment.
  2. Integrate the api changes to your app and test.
  3. Promote changes from sandbox to your live environment.
  4. Release your app updates.

In order to support this workflow the following conventions are enforced by the application:
  1. Model changes can only be made on the sandbox environment. 
  2. Model changes on the live environment as only possible by promoting those changes from sandbox.

You can find more details on how exactly the two environments differ here.