Projects and environments

A project holds everything for one app: its credentials, devices, templates, keys and delivery logs.

Test and live

Every project has two environments.

• Test is for building. Devices registered with test keys only get pushes sent with test keys, so nothing reaches your real users.
• Live is your real users.

The two never mix. Each has its own keys, devices, templates, logs and webhooks, and a device registered in test can’t receive a live push.

Apple’s sandbox and production

Separately from test and live, every Apple push token belongs to one of Apple’s two push servers. Debug builds from Xcode get sandbox tokens; TestFlight and App Store builds get production tokens. The token itself doesn’t say which, so the client SDK reports it with each registration as apns_environment, and PushFleet sends each device to the right server.

That means a TestFlight build on your test keys gets its pushes, and so does a debug build on live keys. A token sent to the wrong Apple server is retried on the other one, never treated as dead.

The key decides

Requests never say which environment they’re for. A pf_sk_test_… key talks to test and a pf_sk_live_… key talks to live, so a test key can’t send a live push by accident, and requests stay a few bytes smaller. To ship, swap the keys.

Differences in live

Live mode requires identity verification when a device registers, so nobody can register their phone under someone else’s user ID. Test mode leaves it optional so the quickstart stays two calls.