How do I test a CircleCI integration without a real organization?

You do not need one. Point your client at a read-only CircleCI replica that already holds the olympus-labs data set, and your code runs unchanged.

01 / The one change

Swap the base URL. Nothing else.

Your client talks to circleci.com. Point it at circleci.sandboxapis.dev instead: same paths, same JSON, same headers, same status codes. No organization to create, no seed script.

For CI, use a pinned host. This page uses circleci-v2-g12.snap.sandboxapis.dev, the newest pin for CircleCI, which answers the same bytes on every run, so an assertion written today still holds next month.

The live host, circleci.sandboxapis.dev, re-rolls daily and can carry a newer generation of the data set than circleci-v2-g12.snap.sandboxapis.dev; every answer on this page is for circleci-v2-g12.snap.sandboxapis.dev.

02 / Run it now

One request, no account.

request.sh

curl "https://circleci-v2-g12.snap.sandboxapis.dev/api/v2/me"

It answers with the user the token belongs to, with an id, a login and a name, as CircleCI's own user object.

03 / Writes

A write gets CircleCI's own error shape.

Every host is read-only. A write answers 403 with CircleCI's own error body, naming what you tried, so your client's existing error handling meets a shape it knows.

403 · application/json

curl -s -X POST "https://circleci-v2-g12.snap.sandboxapis.dev/api/v2/project/gh/olympus-labs/parthenon/pipeline" -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"branch":"main"}'

{"message":"Permission denied. This universe is read-only. See what's covered at https://sandboxapis.dev/coverage. (You tried to POST /api/v2/project/gh/olympus-labs/parthenon/pipeline.) Tell us what you needed to write: https://sandboxapis.dev/feedback"}

04 / Where it stops

Coverage is counted, not claimed.

60 of 61 CircleCI read surfaces are served and verified against CircleCI's own published spec. A call to one that is not covered returns a 404 with an X-SandboxAPIs-Coverage header, never invented data. The row-by-row list is on the CircleCI reference and the coverage page.

Next: read the CircleCI quickstart, or run the four-hop walk to watch one incident cross four services.

What this is not

Read this before you rely on it.

SandboxAPIs is read-only: a write returns the provider's own error unless your key has opted in to scratch writes, and those never reach anybody else. Coverage is bounded, and the manifest that says exactly where it stops is public. The data is a simulated company, not yours and not a copy of anybody's. And it reproduces what each vendor documents and publishes, not the vendor's undocumented behaviour, so keep one test against the real service for that.