Test the connection
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Every key save runs a connection test before anything persists: SleeveFolio asks Alpaca for your basic account details using the keys you supplied. It is a read-only check. A pass proves the keys are valid, match the environment (paper keys against Alpaca’s paper system, live keys against live), and identify exactly one account.
The onboarding wizard’s Broker step offers the same check as a standalone Test connection button: it runs the probe without saving anything, so a typo or a wrong-environment pair surfaces before you finish setup. It is lightly rate-limited — a burst of retries is asked to wait a minute.
One prerequisite: if you have two-factor authentication enrolled, the current sign-in must already be two-factor verified. Saving broker keys is sensitive, so an unverified session is asked to complete its authenticator step first, before the connection test runs.
What a pass looks like
The broker card flips to active, shows a masked preview of your Alpaca account id, and stamps the last-tested time. SleeveFolio records that account id as proof of exactly which Alpaca account is connected — it’s what the card’s masked preview shows. Every read of your account is made with your own stored keys, which is what keeps the data yours alone. If Alpaca had stopped accepting the keys you saved before, a pass also clears the reconnect banner and lets orders on that account through again (see Keys that stopped working).
Common failures
| Symptom | Usual cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| An “unauthorized” error (code 401) | Typo in key/secret, a revoked pair, or keys from the wrong environment (live keys in the paper card, or vice versa) | Regenerate at Alpaca and re-paste both halves, making sure they were generated in the matching (paper vs live) dashboard |
| Timeout | Alpaca outage or network hiccup | Retry; check Alpaca’s status page |
More cases in Broker connection errors.