Projects

Forte organizes resources into Projects. A Project isolates your Users, Services, Websites, Databases, Payments, and Content.

Resources can work together only within the same Project. For example, a User can call any Service in that Project.

Projects are free, with no limit on how many you create. To isolate your test and production environments, create separate staging and production projects.

Sandbox (test) mode

When you create a Project, you can choose to enable sandbox mode. Sandbox projects are ideal for test and pre-production environments. Enabling sandbox mode gives you access to destructive user administration and contact method overrides, and routes Payments through Stripe Test mode.

Sandbox projects are ideal for:

• Development and testing environments — Reproduce edge cases, reset state freely, and test payment and auth flows without real card numbers or waiting on real codes.
• End-to-end and integration testing — Run automated test suites against a real API without touching production data or spending real money.

What's different in a sandbox project

• Hard-delete users — In a live project, users can only be suspended (deactivated with their record retained). In a sandbox project, deletion is immediate and permanent, so you can reset state between test runs. See Administration.
• Override contact methods and verification — You can change a contact method's value or mark it verified without sending a real code. Useful for seeding test users and reproducing edge cases. See Contact Methods.
• Fixed test verification codes — Assign a fixed one-time code to a designated test contact method; every OTP that would be sent to it (verification, one-time-code sign-in, email/SMS MFA) uses that code and nothing is delivered. See Contact Methods → Fixed Test Codes.
• Request/response body logging on by default — Sandbox projects capture full request and response bodies by default; live projects leave this off to avoid logging sensitive production data. Toggle it per service at any time. See Monitoring.
• Test payments — Payments route through a fully sandboxed environment; no real money moves. Use Stripe's test cards to simulate charges, declines, and 3D Secure.

When not to use sandbox mode

Live and sandbox data is isolated. Do not use a sandbox project for:

• Production user traffic — Real users should always authenticate against a live project.
• Real billing — Payment methods and charges in sandbox are test-only.
• Real compliance data — KYC and other compliance information in a sandbox is not treated as legally binding.
• Personal information about real customers — Sandbox projects offer fewer safeguards (hard-delete, direct overrides), so they are not appropriate for real customer PII.

Live versus sandbox summary

Creating a project

What's in a project?

Each Project contains:

• Users — Your customers who can authenticate and interact with your Services
• Services — Containerized applications that run your code on Forte's autoscaling infrastructure with built-in authentication
• Websites — Front-end applications built from your repository and served over a global CDN
• Databases — Managed document and PostgreSQL databases (early access)
• Payments — Charge your users with tax calculation and recurring billing
• Content — Private storage with moderation and a CDN for images and video

Best practices

Split your test and production environments into two separate projects — for example a staging project and a production project. If you need shared test accounts (for example, a fixed login for Apple or Google app-store review), use contact method overrides and fixed test OTP codes in your sandbox project.

Next steps

• Create your first service within a project
• Learn about users and how authentication works