Setting Up Your Environment

A Health Gorilla development environment consists of the systems, credentials, and configuration required to submit authenticated API requests and evaluate responses safely. Environment setup focuses on ensuring the correct context is in place before requesting an access token or sending test calls. Provisioning and enablement are handled by Health Gorilla as part of onboarding and implementation.

Environment Components

A typical Health Gorilla API environment includes the following elements:

A Health Gorilla tenant provisioned for the target environment
OAuth 2.0 client credentials issued for that tenant
A Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) R4 base URL corresponding to the selected environment
A system or tool capable of sending HTTPS requests

These components work together to define where requests are sent, how they are authenticated, and which capabilities are available.

Environment Types

Health Gorilla provides separate environments to support development and production use.

Sandbox environment: Used for development, testing, and validation. The sandbox environment allows your organization to verify authentication, scopes, and request behavior without impacting production data.
Production environment: Used for live integrations and operational workflows. Requests sent to the production environment are evaluated against production configuration and data.

Development and validation typically begin in the sandbox environment before moving to production.

Base URL Configuration

The selected environment determines the FHIR R4 base URL used by your system. Requests must be sent to the base URL that matches the intended environment.

Sandbox environment: https://sandbox.healthgorilla.com/fhir/R4/
Production environment: https://api.healthgorilla.com/fhir/R4/

Using the incorrect base URL may result in authentication failures or unexpected responses.

Credential Management

OAuth 2.0 credentials are issued per environment and are tied to a specific tenant. Separate credentials are provided for the sandbox environment and the production environment.

Credential considerations include:

Secure storage of client IDs and client secrets
Clear separation between sandbox and production credentials
Awareness of which credentials correspond to which base URL

Credentials are used only to request access tokens and should never be embedded directly in API requests.

Tooling and Interfaces

Health Gorilla APIs can be accessed using a variety of tools and interfaces, depending on development needs.

Common options include:

Application code or internal API clients
Postman for interactive request testing
curl or other command-line tools for scripting and automation

Tool choice does not affect API behavior, as long as requests are correctly authenticated and formatted.

Readiness Before Authentication

Before requesting an OAuth 2.0 access token, confirm that the following conditions are met:

The intended environment has been selected.
The correct FHIR base URL is configured.
OAuth 2.0 credentials are available for that environment.
Required features and scopes have been provisioned for the tenant.

Once these elements are in place, the environment is ready for authentication and initial API testing.