Sandboxes and stateful environments

Create a sandbox with the API environments your CI, tests, and evals need. Your coding agent can start the sandbox & environments, connect to your API integrations, run tests, and inspect state changes. Sandboxes and environments are provisioned within seconds and take milliseconds to reset.

A sandbox contains environments

Sandbox: A reusable, time-bounded isolation boundary for tests and rollouts. It holds one or more environments, their state, and scoped credentials.
Environment: Archal's stateful implementation of one external service interface, such as GitHub or Slack. Supported writes persist until reset. Its supported REST or MCP operations, state formats, and reset behavior are documented. It is not a live provider account.

State is the data an environment carries between supported API calls, such as repositories and issues in GitHub or channels and messages in Slack. Writes persist, so later steps can observe earlier actions. Resetting restores the same starting point, making test runs repeatable and comparable.

One sandbox, one or more environments

Starting an environmentAn environment can start with our sample states, a custom state, or blank and fresh. For example, you can start a GitHub environment with 3 repos already loaded in.

GitHubEnvironment
SlackEnvironment
DatadogEnvironment

Choose stateStart sandboxTest and inspectReset and repeat

Median hosted lifecycle timing

Provision sandbox: 690 ms
Start environment: 786 ms
Reset environment: 245 ms

Three common uses

Connector and harness teams

Repeat one cross-service task from the same starting state to compare models, prompts, tools, and harness changes.

Integration and QA teams

Run each CI job against isolated service data and assert on final records without maintaining shared test accounts.

RL and post-training teams

Create parallel rollouts from declared states. Your trainer owns the policy and reward; Archal supplies the repeatable task state.

Where Archal fits

Archal provides: Sandbox lifecycle, scoped credentials, cleanup, and each environment's supported APIs and state operations.
You keep: Agent or integration code, harness, CI, eval platform, observability, and verifiers.