Sandboxes v2.0: Multiple port mapping & authorization

In September 2020, we released new and completely revamped Sandboxes, a functionality that lets developers create staging environments directly from the chosen branch, tag, or pull request. The feature is currently in beta, as we want to ensure that it covers all most popular use cases and everything works flawlessly.

In response to your feedback, this week we added two new functionalities:

1. HTTP Basic Authorization
2. Support for multiple HTTP ports for public access

HTTP Basic Authorization

Each sandbox has a public URL address. The address is forwarded to the sandboxes via a specific HTTP port. For example, if your sandbox is serving the application on port 8080, you can open your website in the browser using the defined https://mysandbox.live.page URL address.

The most common use case for sandboxes is testing the application before the release to production. You can either test it automatically with a pipeline within the sandbox, or send its URL to the client for the review.

However, when developing a website or an application there's often stuff that shouldn't be publicly available. To help you keep things under control, we introduced username/password authorization to the public. You can set this option when adding a new sandbox, or later in the Settings:

Image loading...

Multiple HTTP port support

Until recently, using the predefined URL address you could expose only one HTTP port to the public. In other words, with one address you could share the visuals of the application (i.e. the website), but no other components, such as the API. From now on, you can define up to 5 URL addresses for each HTTP port. What's important, you can set up individual authorization for each entry:

Image loading...

What's next

This is the list of things we're currently working on:

• Authorization to sandboxes with Buddy's credentials
• Authorization with SSO in both application and sandboxes
• Better GitFlow support in Sandboxes