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Access and Use Your Sandbox Account to Develop Apps and Integrations with RingCentral Connect Platform

We received the following question from a developer and I wanted to address this since it is important to your ability to access, manage, configure, create data, and develop within the RingCentral Sandbox, and because we have received this request from other developers too:

"I don't seem to be able to log into our dev portal and when i try to reset the password it says the phone number is invalid."

We have two systems which are independent, and provide the interoperabilty required to develop with RingCentral's Connect Platform.

The Online Account Portal - https://service[.devtest].ringcentral.com

AND

The Developer Portal - https://developer[s].ringcentral.com

Each of these two systems requires unique RingCentral usernames (phone numbers) and passwords in order to access the resources they contain, and which developers will need to use while engineering their applications and integrations. We will cover this in this article.

Here is the screenshot the developer provided and described as the Developer Portal in his support request. Right away I knew what might be the problem.




The screenshot shared is the Online Account Portal which has two versions, one for your Sandbox account and one for your Production account and can be found at: https://service[.devtest].ringcentral.com) notice the optional ".devtest" which can be included in the URL and is what distinguishes between the two. Including ".devtest" in the URL will point to your Sandbox account in RingCentral.

The Online Account Portal, is where you can configure your RingCentral Sandbox account for development. It is how you setup things such as new Users/Extensions for your development and testing needs.

Online Account Portal is used to:

  • Creating a new user
  • Assigning a new phone number to a user
  • Creating a new user who does not have Administrator permissions in your RingCentral account to make sure the API requests you execute are properly scoped for the use-case you're trying to address
  • Adding devices to your account
  • Other valuable management actions you already use with your RingCentral account

You can also use the Sandbox Online Account Portal tool for things like debugging your application or API requests, for instance...

Let's say your API request to our Call Log resource (/restapi/v1.0/account//call-log) is not providing you any results (aka: records via the API), but you think you should have received those results. You can login to the Sandbox version of your Online Account Portal (https://service.devtest.ringcentral.com) to view the call log data and verify your API response results. If you did see data in the Call Logs of Online Account Portal, but not in your API response (and you received an HTTP 200 response)...you can start looking at these things as possible ways to debug:

  • Are you using the correct API server (in this case the Sandbox API server): https://platform.devtest.ringcentral.com
  • Are you properly using dateFrom and dateTo (our documentation says the default is records from the last 24 hours)
  • Etc...

Here's the difference between Online Account Portal and the Developer Portal

The Developer Portal can be found at: https://developer.ringcentral.com. Right away, you can see that the login interface for the Developer Portal does not match the screenshot from above for the Online Account Portal.


You can use the Developer Portal to locate the phoneNumber/Username you use to access the Sandbox version of your Online Account Portal. Within each application you define in the Developer Portal, there is a section tab labeled "Settings", and it contains the username/phoneNumber you need to access the Online Account Portal for both production and sandbox accounts.


To access the Developer Portal, you will use your RingCentral Production User/Extension credentials which have administrator permissions enabled. This grants you the ability to create a Sandbox account for use with development in the RingCentral Platform, as well as the ability to view applications created for your organization.

The Sandbox account IS NOT your production RingCentral account that your business uses day-to-day. It is a completely new and empty account which will only have a single user (the super admin) available.

Developer Portal is used to:

  • Creating your Sandbox account for development purposes
  • Defining new applications and obtaining their API keys
  • Changing permissions for an application
  • Viewing your application's analytical data and production access requests (see the Status & Review tab for your Application)
  • Creating or updating your application's OAuth Redirect URI which is used heavily by Public applications implementing our 3-Legged OAuth flow
  • Creating or viewing your Support cases
  • Accessing the Developer Community to answer and ask questions to the experts
  • Viewing our API Explorer, API Developer Guide, and more

There are several other valuable reasons for using the Developer Portal, but that provides you the information you need to understand the difference between these two systems as well as understanding how they provide you with the interoperability to engineer applications and integrations with the RingCentral Connect Platform.

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Developer sandbox tools

Using the RingCentral Phone for Desktop, you can dial or receive test calls, send and receive test SMS or Fax messages in your sandbox environment.

Download RingCentral Phone for Desktop:

Tip: switch to the "sandbox mode" before logging in the app:

  • On MacOS: press "fn + command + f2" keys
  • On Windows: press "Ctrl + F2" keys

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Mary-Community_Moderator contributed to this article benjamin-dean contributed to this article