Test / Sandbox API server / key?

[Matthew Robben]

Hi all - I'm building some test cases to validate that our backend scenarios work as expected for syncing users to mailchimp. 

One of the things I'm doing is making a series of calls to listSubscribe / listUnsubscribe. My test cases run quickly. Is there a sandbox API key or test environment I can connect to rather than our production mailchimp account to keep us from looking suspicious or getting us rate limited or banned?

I can create HTTP nocks to ensure we don't actually hit your service, but then I'm just returning fake data and it's always good to have a sandbox environment for us devs to play with. Does such a thing exist?

Feedback: Your API documentation is awesome. Appreciate the detail.

Thanks,

~M

[jesse]

Nope, but accounts are free. General best practices and info on rate limiting are here:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/faq/

jesse

[Jeff Winn]

Jesse,

 

Not exactly sure how an account would accomplish the same thing as a real test environment would. The only thing I can think of that would accomplish is segregation of the test and production data. That would be useful, but I believe a test environment would provide more than just segregation of the two datasets and provide better testing of integration functionality without worrying that emails could be sent accidentally.

 

If you had a test environment exposed, we could test all of our application integration points against your API (including createCampaign and campaignSendNow) and not be concerned with emails being sent. At a bare minimum, having a setting on each API key which can be turned on/off that prevents it from sending emails (even if the API is called) would at least give us some sense of security.

 

- Jeff

[lizrice]

+1.  

I set up a test list which I can experiment with during development - but it's not very satisfactory because you have to make sure your test and production lists have exactly the same settings, groups, fields etc.

A sandbox environment where you can test against the settings on your real list without ever sending any emails would be great (though I can see this has a lot of complexity to it).  

It would also help to be able to duplicate an existing list - everything except the subscriber list - so that you could copy your live list to a test list and know they have all the right fields and groups. (This wouldn't solve everything - any changes you made to the test list would still need to be hand-applied to the production list, but it would be a start.) 

Loving Mailchimp anyway!

Liz