Sandbox environment
A sandbox is a safe, isolated environment where you can try out an integration exactly as you would in production, without any real-world consequences. It lets you send documents, trigger status changes, and explore edge cases freely, so that by the time you move to production your integration has already been exercised end to end. Our sandbox is built to mirror the production behavior of A-Cube API as closely as possible, with a few deliberate differences described below.
The base URL is https://fr-sandbox.api.acubeapi.com
A test Peppol network
The sandbox is connected to the Peppol Test Network rather than the production Peppol Network. This is a real network, not a mock: documents you send are genuinely delivered over Peppol, and you'll get genuine delivery confirmations and errors back, just as you would in production. The only thing that changes is which network you're plugged into.
Because it's a real network, you're not limited to testing against other A-Cube companies. You can exchange documents with any legal entity that has completed onboarding on the Peppol Test Network, regardless of which Access Point or Service Provider (PA) they registered with. This makes the sandbox a good place to validate interoperability with your actual trading partners' providers, not just with A-Cube.
A local copy of the annuaire
When you register a legal entity in the sandbox, we don't check it against the production annuaire. Instead, we look it up in a local copy of the directory that we keep and refresh periodically. This copy is only a subset of the full production annuaire, so it's possible that a specific company you're looking for simply isn't there yet. If that happens while you're setting up your tests, let us know and we'll help you find an alternative.
Note: In the sandbox, we don't enforce a legal entity existence check against the annuaire when you send a document. Combined with the fact that the Peppol Test Network is real, this means you can test against companies that are registered on the Peppol Test Network through a PA other than A-Cube, even though they don't appear in our local copy of the directory.
Nothing reaches the PPF
Because this is a testing environment, none of the data you send ever reaches the real PPF (Portail Public de Facturation). The whole exchange, from submission to status updates, stays within the test network and our sandbox infrastructure.
Setting up your first active/passive test
To test both flows, active (sending) and passive (receiving), against each other, you'll need two onboarded companies to exchange documents between. Here's how to get there:
- Find your test companies. Use the legal entity search endpoint to search our local annuaire by name, and pick one or two companies you'd like to use for testing.
- Onboard them. Run the onboarding process for each of the companies you selected.
- Give it 24 hours. Onboarding needs up to a day to fully complete before the companies are ready to exchange documents.
- Start exchanging invoices. Once the 24 hours have passed, you can send invoices between the two companies and follow both the active and the passive flow end to end.
What's coming next
We're working on dedicated endpoints that will let you simulate submission to the PPF and the reception of the corresponding status updates, so you'll soon be able to test the full status lifecycle on demand, without depending on a real counterparty.