Premium Sandbox

In addition to our production environment, we have a sandbox environment which we will use for targeted development and experimentation. The sandbox is a copy of our production environment, refreshed biannually (in Feb and Aug).

Logging In

• Regular staff login (CAS): https://princeton-psb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com/SAML
• For generic users (e.g. catbasic1): https://princeton-psb.alma.exlibrisgroup.com

Sandbox development workflow

Note: Sandbox permissions requests are not processed through SN@P, as production permissions requests are.

1. Proposal: Set up a brief consultation (Zoom) with the Library Discovery and Integrated System Analyst/Coordinator to create an alma-config ticket (as needed)

2. Access: the Alma Tech Team will assign additional permissions as needed

3. Development: Experiment and test in the sandbox
4. Review: After the proposed changes have been made in the sandbox, they are reviewed with the Alma Tech Team
5. Communication: Upcoming changes to production are communicated to affected stakeholders (departmental check-ins and in issues on the alma-config repo)
6. Implementation: System admins implement the approved changes in production
   
   

Biannual Sandbox Refresh: System Administrator Tasks

Twice yearly (in Aug and Feb) the sandbox is refreshed, making it a copy of our production data and configuration settings. The following tasks need to be done by the system administrators:

Before refresh

• Export lists of roles for users with roles differing from production
• Export allowed S/FTP connections
• Export allowed emails
• Export staff login report
• Verify that the 'Webhook Monitoring Staging' integration profile setting is identical to prod.

After refresh 

• Change the sandbox color scheme to orange (prod is black)
• Recreate the informational banner
• Restore elevated permissions to select users
• Restore (via import) allowed emails
• Restore (via import) allowed S/FTP connections
• Ensure that 'New Princeton SFTP Staging' connection has been copied over from production
• Use 'New Princeton SFTP Staging' for all relevant publishing profiles ('Incremental Publishing', 'General Publishing', etc.)
• Copy the URL and secret key from 'Webhook Monitoring Staging' in prod and reactivate it

Detailed checklists are in alma-config issue templates