Overview

Sandbox

Relay supports Persona’s sandbox environment, so you can build and test a full integration — session creation, the user-facing verification, the Privacy Pass, and claim retrieval — without running real verifications or incurring usage charges.

Availability

Relay must be enabled for your sandbox environment, which depends on your Persona plan. If issuing a Privacy Pass returns a “Privacy Pass for Relay is not enabled” error, talk to your Persona team or contact us.

What’s different in sandbox

Sandbox behaves like production from your integration’s point of view — the same endpoints, the same request and response shapes, the same Privacy Pass flow, the same payload shape and encryption. What changes is what happens underneath:

  • No real verification is performed. Sandbox does not evaluate the end user — the claim result is simulated. See Environments.
  • No usage charges. Sandbox activity is not billed.
  • A separate Privacy Pass scope. A sandbox pass cannot be redeemed against a production relay, and a production pass cannot be redeemed against a sandbox relay.

What a sandbox claim returns

Sandbox claims always pass

A sandbox relay returns "claim_result": "passed" for every claim type. The result is fixed — it does not depend on what the end user did, and it is returned even if the verification flow was never started or completed. Use sandbox to prove your integration is wired up correctly, not to test how your application handles a failing claim.

The payload is otherwise identical to production:

{
  "claim_type": "live_human_presence",
  "claim_result": "passed",
  "methodology": [{ "method": "live_selfie", "result": "passed" }]
}
  • methodology reports a single calculation — the primary method configured for that claim type — and is omitted for claim types that hide methodology, exactly as in production.
  • If you supplied an encryptionKeyPem, the payload is still RSA-OAEP encrypted. Decrypt it the same way.
  • Because the claim passes, a successful redemption returns token-consumed: true and the pass is spent. Errors leave the pass unspent, exactly as in production.

Selecting the environment

Sandbox is opt-in on top of whichever server-side integration you already use. See the documentation for your server-side integration method for the specifics:

  • The Server SDKs infer the environment from your API key, so a sandbox key runs against sandbox with nothing further to configure.
  • The Relay Gateway Service and the API take a sandbox field on relay creation.

Client-side integrations

Nothing changes in the client-side integration. During the flow you can use Persona’s sandbox controls to move an end user through passing and failing paths, which is useful for exercising your own UI — though as above, the Relay claim itself returns passed either way.