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Environments

Smartbills provides two distinct environments to help you develop and test your integration before going live.

Available Environments

Production Environment

The production environment is where your live application runs and processes real transactions. Base URL: https://api.smartbills.io
Production API keys are only enabled once your application has been approved by our team.

Pre-Production (Sandbox) Environment

The pre-production environment is a safe space to develop and test your integration without affecting real data. Base URL: https://sandbox-api.smartbills.io
All developer accounts have immediate access to the pre-production environment.

Key Differences

Using Different Environments

You can switch between environments by changing the base URL in your API requests:

Best Practices

Store your API keys and base URLs as environment variables to easily switch between environments.
Always test your integration thoroughly in the pre-production environment before deploying to production.
  • Test all API endpoints
  • Verify error handling
  • Test webhook delivery
  • Validate data formats
Use different API keys for each environment and never use production keys in development.
Set up monitoring and logging for both environments to catch issues early.

Getting Access

Pre-Production Access

  1. Create a Smartbills account at smartbills.io
  2. Visit the developer portal
  3. Create a new application
  4. Your pre-production API keys will be generated immediately

Production Access

  1. Complete your integration in pre-production
  2. Submit your application for review
  3. Our team will review your integration
  4. Once approved, your production API keys will be activated
Production API keys will only work with the production base URL (api.smartbills.io). Using production keys with the pre-production URL will result in authentication errors.

Data Isolation

Data between environments is completely isolated:
  • Users created in pre-production do not exist in production
  • Receipts and transactions are environment-specific
  • Webhooks are sent to different endpoints per environment
This ensures that your testing activities never affect your production data or users.