Test organization domains

Organization domain ownership verification normally proves that an Organization controls a domain by having an admin publish a DNS TXT record that Clerk then scans for. Publishing a real record isn't practical in local development or end-to-end tests, so test mode provides reserved test domains that skip the DNS lookup.

Set up test mode

Every development instance has test mode enabled by default. If you need to use test mode on a production instance, you can enable it in the Clerk Dashboard. However, this is highly discouraged.

To enable or disable test mode, in the Clerk Dashboard, navigate to the Instance Settings⁠ page.

Test domains

In test mode, any subdomain of the reserved clerk.test domain is a test domain, and Clerk skips the DNS lookup when verifying its ownership. For example, acme.clerk.test and example.clerk.test are both test domains.

The bare clerk.test apex isn't a test domain; it must be a subdomain. Test domains only apply to development instances with test mode enabled — on a production instance, acme.clerk.test is treated as any other domain and requires the TXT record.

Verify ownership of a test domain

The flow is unchanged from a real domain: call prepareOwnershipVerification() and then attemptOwnershipVerification(), and skip publishing the TXT record.

Two other checks are relaxed for test domains:

• Attempts aren't throttled, so tests don't need to wait between attempts.
• Adding a test domain skips the check that rejects common and disposable email domains.