Developer Sandbox

A simulated environment to test your HITs.

About the Sandbox

The Mechanical Turk Developer Sandbox is a simulated environment that lets you test your applications and Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) prior to publication in the marketplace.

Benefits:

Free to use for registered Mechanical Turk requesters. Fees will not be withdrawn and payments are not made to Worker accounts.
Has functional parity with the production website.
Requires only a URL change to configure your application to work against the developer sandbox or the production website.

Get Started

To access the sandbox, you will need a Mechanical Turk Requester account and, in order to access the sandbox programmatically, you will need an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.

Visit the Requester Sandbox

Requester Site Sandbox

You can create test HITs in the Requester Sandbox to make sure your design or application works.

Visit the Requester Sandbox »

Worker Site Sandbox

You can view HITs created in the Requester Sandbox to see how they will appear to Workers.

Visit the Worker Sandbox »

Sandbox FAQs

How do I use the Developer Sandbox?

How do I configure my application to use the Developer Sandbox?

To use the Developer Sandbox during development and testing, set the URL service endpoint in your code based on the web service interface you are using:

SOAP service endpoint:
http://mechanicalturk.sandbox.amazonaws.com?Service=AWSMechanicalTurkRequester
REST service endpoint:
http://mechanicalturk.sandbox.amazonaws.com

To use the Developer Sandbox for testing HITs using external questions, set the destination URL for the form action to be:

http://workersandbox.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit

To switch your application to the production Mechanical Turk system, set the URL service endpoint to:

SOAP service endpoint:
http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com?Service=AWSMechanicalTurkRequester
REST service endpoint:
http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com

To switch your HITs using external questions to the production Mechanical Turk system, set the destination URL for the form action to be:

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit

Example for SOAP:

If you are using Apache Axis as your SOAP toolkit, you can override the service endpoint with the following method:
// Set up the web service client
AWSMechanicalTurkRequesterLocator locator = new AWSMechanicalTurkRequesterLocator();

//This is the production endpoint
//String serviceURL = "http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com?Service=AWSMechanicalTurkRequester";

//This is the sandbox endpoint
String serviceURL = "http://mechanicalturk.sandbox.amazonaws.com?Service=AWSMechanicalTurkRequester";

String portName = "AWSMechanicalTurkRequesterPort";
locator.setEndpointAddress(portName, serviceURL);

Example for REST:

If you are using PERL, you can specify the endpoint by replacing the URL for the request:
# Construct the request
my $parameters = {
    Service => $SERVICE_NAME,
    Version => $SERVICE_VERSION,
    AWSAccessKeyId => $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
    Timestamp => $timestamp,
    Signature => $signature,
    Operation => $operation,
};

# Make the request
# This is the production endpoint
# my $url = "http://mechanicalturk.amazonaws.com?";

# This is the sandbox endpoint
my $url = "http://mechanicalturk.sandbox.amazonaws.com?";

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $response = $ua->post($url, $parameters);

Example for HITs using external questions:

Set the form action URL to your desired environment:
<body>

<form method="POST" action="http://workersandbox.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit">


<input type="hidden" id="assignmentId" name="assignmentId" value="">

What features of Mechanical Turk are not supported in the Developer Sandbox?

What are the guidelines and policies for the Developer Sandbox?

Developer Forum

Have a question about the Application Program Interface (API) or Command Line Tools (CLTs)? Post your questions and comments in the developer forum.

Visit the Developer Forum »