How to log into a salesforce.com sandbox?

Question

I took over a Rails app and am trying to get the Salesforce.com API credentials set up for my user account.

I'm set as a system admin with "Developer Mode" on (though I have no clue what that does, I just saw it set on the previous account.)

We have a sandbox. I click the login link on it, enter my sandbox username ([email protected]), enter my password, and get "Login attempt has failed".

I know my password is okay since I've logged into the production site several times. Using different domains (test.salesforce.com, etc) doesn't help either.

Edit to clarify where I'm stuck:

I'm logged into the production site and under "my sandboxes" there's a login link next to each sandbox which takes you to the correct server and pre-fills your sandbox username.

So, my issues are with that, getting logged into the sandbox web interface.

I do understand the security tokens and have my production API stuff set up, but I'd rather try my changes out on the sandbox first! From the examples I've seen, the sandbox security tokens are different, so I'm trying to log into the sandbox web interface for that.

Answer 1

You won't be able to login from https://login.salesforce.com that's only for production.

You're correct to use the sandbox instance https://test.salesforce.com (or https://cs1.salesforce.com, https://cs2.salesforce.com, etc.)

I'm sure you figured out [email protected] is your regular username, but the "sandbox" part is the actual name of your sandbox. So if you named your sandbox as "sbx" you would login as [email protected]

If that doesn't work, go to your production organization where you can login. Navigate to Setup -> Data Management -> Sandbox and then click the Login button next to the sandbox you wish you login to.

Answer 2

Firstly - having developer mode on just offers you a subtly different view of Pages, making it easier to write your force.com solutions (it splits the View with the Controller) but this is not affecting your login issues:

I'm not 100% clear whether you are failing to log into your sandbox's website, or whether you are failing to connect via the API.

If you cannot use your production password on the sandbox, you will need to get someone who is an admin on that sandbox to reset your password for you.

If you can use your production password to log into the sandbox, but cannot use it to hook up to the API, then this is the problem: Salesforce.com trusts users that come through the web UI; However, in order to log in to the API, you need to append an extra bit of user information to your password - this is your Security token.

You can reset this in Setup...My Personal Information... Reset MY Security Token

the token will get emailed to you - it will be some obscure alpha-numeric token. Copy this and paste it to the end of your password. For example if your password was 'arthur', and the token was ABC123def, the credentials to pass through would be:

login: [email protected]

password: arthurABC123def

Answer 3

My user account was created after the sandbox. So, it wasn't in the sandbox.

A sandbox refresh added my account into the sandbox.

Pretty basic mistake.