Dev tenants and test mode

A dev tenant is a separate ARC organization for building and testing your app. It holds synthetic data only and is always in test mode, so nothing you do in it reaches a real customer.

Provision a dev tenant

Sign in to your own organization as a user with the settings:apps:manage permission (Owner or Admin by default; the Custom Apps plan switch must be on), then call:

mutation {
  provisionDevTenant(input: { name: "My app sandbox", subdomain: "myapp-sandbox" }) {
    organizationId
    subdomain
    onboardingId
  }
}

• The subdomain follows the same rules as signup and must be free.
• You are the dev tenant's first user (its Owner), with your own email address.
• It copies your organization's country, currency and time zone, and nothing else.
• A dev tenant cannot provision another dev tenant.

Setup runs in the background, exactly like a new signup. Follow it at GET /onboarding/progress/<onboardingId> (server-sent events). When it completes, GET /onboarding/status/<onboardingId> returns your first sign-in tokens. After that, sign in as usual with a sign-in code: account email to the dev tenant's own staff is delivered (see below).

What a dev tenant contains

The usual new-workspace setup (roles, units, a warehouse, tax presets for the country), plus four synthetic partners: three customers and one supplier, named ZZ Dev …, tagged synthetic. They have no email address or phone number. Never import real customer data into a dev tenant.

Test mode

Every dev tenant is in test mode. While an organization is in test mode:

Channel	What happens
Account email (sign-in codes, password resets, invites) to the organization's own active staff	Delivered, so you can sign in. Every recipient must be staff of that organization.
Every other email (documents, reports, SMTP test sends, and account email to anyone else)	Kept in a sink. Never sent. The send reports success so your flow carries on.
WhatsApp messages	Kept in the sink. Never sent.
Webhooks	Delivered, with X-ARC-Environment: test.

Every webhook carries X-ARC-Environment: test from a test-mode organization, live from any other. Use it to keep test traffic out of your production data:

const result = verifyWebhook({ rawBody, headers, secret });
if (result.ok && result.environment === 'test') {
  // route to your sandbox, never to production
}

A customer you add to a dev tenant never receives mail from it, sign-in codes included.