Best practices for using HubSpot developer sandboxes and CMS sandboxes with Cotonity to test integrations safely before going live.
Types of HubSpot sandbox environments
HubSpot offers two sandbox options: the Developer Sandbox (available on all plans with a developer account) and the CMS Sandbox (for CMS Hub subscribers). The Developer Sandbox is a fully isolated HubSpot portal with no connection to your production data, ideal for testing integrations. It comes pre-populated with a set of sample contacts and deals. CMS Sandboxes are clones of your production portal for testing content changes; they share the same underlying CRM, which means API calls in a CMS sandbox can affect real production data. Use the Developer Sandbox for all Cotonity integration testing.
Connecting Cotonity to a sandbox portal
Create a separate Cotonity workspace (or use the Staging environment if your plan includes it) and connect it to your HubSpot Developer Sandbox portal via the same OAuth flow used for production. Give the workspace a clear name like [SANDBOX] Event Booking to avoid confusion. Configure all the same workflows in the sandbox workspace that you plan to deploy to production — field mappings, triggers, action sequences — and test them against the sample data. Because the sandbox is isolated, no real contacts or deals are affected during testing.
Promoting configurations to production
Cotonity provides a Configuration Export/Import tool that serializes your workflow configurations, field mappings, and trigger settings to a JSON file. Export from your sandbox workspace, review the file to confirm no environment-specific values (such as sandbox-specific list IDs or user IDs) are included, update any environment-specific values for production, and import into your production workspace. Cotonity validates the imported configuration for consistency before activating it, flagging any references to objects that do not exist in the production portal.
Testing with realistic data
HubSpot's Developer Sandbox includes about 25 sample contacts with varied lifecycle stages, but for thorough integration testing you may need a larger and more realistic dataset. HubSpot allows you to import contacts via CSV into the sandbox portal. Create a test dataset that mirrors the diversity of your production data — varied lifecycle stages, different property values, contacts with and without associated companies or deals. This helps catch edge cases in your Cotonity workflows — such as missing required properties or unexpected enumeration values — before they cause errors in production.