Sandbox

Free simulated MT4 and MT5 accounts. No card, no broker login, no terminal boot. Your first call in under two minutes.

The sandbox gives you MT4 and MT5 accounts that answer the real API but run on a simulated terminal. You don’t need a card, a broker login or a subscription, and you don’t wait for a terminal to start. Everything you build against the sandbox works unchanged on a live account.

• Free. Sandbox usage is never billed and never counts as a seat.
• Separate. Sandbox keys start with twsk_. A sandbox key can’t see or touch a live account, and a live key can’t see or touch a sandbox one.
• Marked. Every data response from a sandbox account carries the header X-Tickwire-Sandbox: true, and sandbox accounts show "sandbox": true.
• Limited. Up to 5 accounts per sandbox, and 10 requests per second per account (bursts of 20). Over the limit you get 429 rate_limited with Retry-After. A sandbox also holds up to 5 active sandbox keys and 20 each of API tokens, read-only keys and agent keys. Anonymous sign-up allows 5 sandboxes an hour and 10 a day from one address.
• Kept while you use it. A sandbox from anonymous sign-up is deleted, with its keys and accounts, after 7 days without an API call. Sandboxes you get from a live key or the dashboard stay as long as your account does.
• Simulated state. Balances, positions and orders live in memory. They reset when you redeploy the account, and may reset after a week of inactivity or a sandbox restart.

Your first call in two minutes

export TW=https://api.tickwire.io

# 1. Get a sandbox key and a connected MT5 account (no sign-in needed)
curl -s -X POST "$TW/v1/sandbox/signup" -H "content-type: application/json" -d '{"platform": "mt5"}'

{
  "sandbox": true,
  "tenantId": "9f3c…",
  "apiKey": "twsk_4b1e…",
  "account": { "id": "acc_7Qx", "platform": "mt5", "server": "Tickwire-Sandbox",
               "login": "1000", "state": "DEPLOYED", "connectionStatus": "CONNECTED" }
}

The key is shown once. Keep it:

export TW_KEY=twsk_4b1e…
export ACC=acc_7Qx

# 2. Read the account
curl -s "$TW/users/current/accounts/$ACC/account-information" -H "auth-token: $TW_KEY"

# 3. Buy 0.01 EURUSD
curl -s -X POST "$TW/users/current/accounts/$ACC/trade" \
  -H "auth-token: $TW_KEY" -H "Idempotency-Key: first-order-1" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"actionType": "ORDER_TYPE_BUY", "symbol": "EURUSD", "volume": 0.01}'

# 4. See the position
curl -s "$TW/users/current/accounts/$ACC/positions" -H "auth-token: $TW_KEY"

The trade answers "outcome": "applied" with numericCode 10009. Send step 3 again with the same Idempotency-Key and you get the same answer and no second position.

The sandbox quotes EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY and XAUUSD. Prices move a little every second.

A key from anonymous sign-up is limited to your sandbox accounts, trading, streaming and reads. It can’t create webhooks, pre-trade hooks, agent keys or more keys, and it can’t create, change or delete risk-management trackers or guard rules (it can still read trackers, statistics and metrics). For those, sign in and get a sandbox key from your live key; it has full rights inside your sandbox:

curl -s -X POST "$TW/v1/sandbox/keys" -H "X-API-Key: $YOUR_LIVE_KEY"

Add more sandbox accounts

Use the ordinary account API with your twsk_ key, server Tickwire-Sandbox, and a magic login from the table below. Any password works.

curl -s -X POST "$TW/users/current/accounts" \
  -H "auth-token: $TW_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "lost reply", "platform": "mt5", "server": "Tickwire-Sandbox",
       "login": "1031", "password": "anything"}'

The account is deployed at once. Its connectionStatus comes from the simulated terminal’s own health check, the same rule as a live account: CONNECTED only when that check says so.

Magic logins

Like test card numbers, each login makes the sandbox simulate one condition, every time. They work on mt5 and mt4. Any other login behaves like 1000.

MT4 accounts ("platform": "mt4") behave as MT4 does. Market depth (…/symbols/{symbol}/current-book) and tick history (…/historical-market-data/…/ticks) answer with the error not_supported_on_mt4. Try it with any login.

Moving to live

1. Create a live key on the dashboard, and connect a broker account (see the Quickstart).
2. Swap twsk_… for the live key and Tickwire-Sandbox for your broker’s server.

Nothing else changes: same paths, same fields, same outcomes. Sandbox accounts stay in the sandbox; they’re never moved to or mixed with live ones.

Errors you may see