Some weeks ago I published my first try  with Tooling API where I could explain how to create a Custom field with this API, but when I worked on that, what I really needed was to create a Sandbox programatically. OMG!! A Sandbox!! And how can I do it?

At the end, a Sandbox is metadata, and as we learnt on my previous blog, Tooling API will help you to create metadata records. SandboxInfo is the object that represents a Sandbox, and we will use it to create our new environment.

SandboxInfo supports Get, Post, Patch and Delete REST API calls, that means, that with Post we will create a new Sandbox, with Patch we will do an update, a refresh at the end, and the Delete would remove the organization.

As you can see in the link there are lot of options when you create a Sandbox, like create the copy Chatter from production to Sandbox, or event it gives you the option to use Template to create the org. But if you need a simple environment, with below JSON body is more than enough:

{
   "Description": "New Test Sandbox",
   "HistoryDays": 0,
   "LicenseType": "DEVELOPER",
   "SandboxName": "SandboxTest"
}

And in order to execute it you can make a Post REST call with this url:

/services/data/v42.0/tooling/sobjects/SandboxInfo

This call will return an Id that you can use in order to check the creation progress via another object, SandboxProcess. You can perform a query against this object filtering by SandboxInfoId field, and get useful information such us CopyProgress that represents how much of the copy has been already performed.

Finally I would like to remind you that you could only make this call against a Production org, and if your user has the rights to create Sandboxes. Otherwise, it will fail.