It may occasionally be part of your job to get inside of the guts of ArchivesSpace so that you can test a new release, diagnose a bug, or generally get a better sense of what’s going on with the system that you rely 
on. Also, depending on your organizational structure and the way that resources are distributed, you may need to be in a position to help your local IT department answer questions about what’s happening with ArchivesSpace.
It’s (very smart) common practice to not give access to server environments beyond a small cadre of IT department professionals. And you wouldn’t want to experiment there anyway! Thus, you need a sandbox.
A few folks have asked for instructions about how to create this environment. In short, you’ll be installing ArchivesSpace on your local machines and then hooking it up to a copy of your production MySQL database. I’m assuming that your organization uses MySQL behind ArchivesSpace because most do. There’s really great documentation about all of this on the ArchivesSpace github page, but it may be overwhelming if you haven’t done this before. By the way, if you’ve ever managed a database before, you really don’t need this tutorial.
I’ll also talk through configuration, regular updates to the database from your production database, and things to think about when testing.
Congratulations! You’re about to create a consequence-free environment. This means that you should feel free to mess around, take risks, and learn by breaking things. You’re going to break things. Continue reading Mucking around in ArchivesSpace Locally