Set Up Your Square Account

Provides instructions for creating and configuring a Square developer account, which is used to obtain the OAuth access token required by Square APIs.

A Square account provides access to both seller features and developer features.

  • Seller features are managed from the Square Dashboard (also referred to as the Seller Dashboard) and other first-party Square products. The Square Dashboard provides tools that help sellers run their business, such as the Square Online dashboard where sellers create and manage their Square Online sites.

  • Developer features are managed from the Developer Dashboard. The term Square developer account indicates that the account is used primarily for development purposes.

For custom site development, your Square account credentials are used in the OAuth flow that obtains an OAuth access token from a seller. You’ll provide this access token to authorize your Square Online CLI commands (or equivalent Sites API requests).

You can also optionally create a new site in your Square account for testing purposes.

Create a Square account and application

To create an account, open the Square Developer sign-up page, review the terms, and follow the prompts that guide you through creating an account and registering an application.

If you already have an account but you need to register an application, sign in to the Developer Dashboard, choose the + tile, and provide an application name.

When you need to get your application ID, client ID, or other credentials, sign in to the Developer Dashboard and open the application.

The Developer Dashboard lets you access and manage credentials and settings for the production or Sandbox environment. Sandbox isn’t supported for custom site development, so make sure that the Production toggle is selected.

Testing with a site in your own account

You can optionally test some custom site development flows against a new site in your Square account.

To create a Square Online site

  1. Sign in to the Square Dashboard and choose Online in the left pane.

  2. If you haven’t created any sites, choose Get started and follow the prompts to create your first site. When you’re finished, the Online dashboard page opens in multi-site mode.

    If you have an existing site, create a new site by choosing Add site from the site switcher dropdown menu at the top of the left navigation pane.

Before you can test with your site, you must provide the Square team with your application ID and the account’s User ID so they can add you to the allow list for custom site development. For more information, see Prerequisites in the Get Started topic.

Next steps

Set up your OAuth flow so you can get the OAuth access token required to work with custom sites. For more information, see Manage Access to the Square APIs.

Note that you can use your personal access token when testing against a site in your own account.