Overview

The following is a guide for implementing a new Sentry SDK. It covers the protocol for event submission as well as guidelines for how clients should typically look and behave.

Writing an SDK

At its core an SDK is a set of utilities for capturing data about an exceptional state in an application. Given this data, it then builds and sends a JSON payload to the Sentry server.

The following items are expected of production-ready SDKs:

• DSN configuration
• Graceful failures (e.g. Sentry server is unreachable)
• Setting attributes (e.g. tags and extra data)
• Support for Linux, Windows and OS X (where applicable)

Feature based support is required for the following:

• If cookie data is available, it’s not sent by default
• If POST data is available, it’s not sent by default

Additionally, the following features are highly encouraged:

• Automated error capturing (e.g. uncaught exception handlers)
• Logging framework integration
• Non-blocking event submission
• Context data helpers (e.g. setting the current user, recording breadcrumbs)
• Event sampling
• Honor Sentry’s Rate Limiting HTTP headers
• Pre and Post event send hooks
• Local variable values in stack trace (on platforms where this is possible)
• Send an environment on each event. If none was detected or set by the user, production should be used.

Usage for End-users

Generally, using an SDK consists of three steps for the end user, which should look almost identical no matter the language:

1. Initialization of the SDK (sometimes this is hidden from the user):

   JavaScriptPython

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   Sentry.init({dsn: 'https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0'});

2. Capturing an event:

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   var resultId = Sentry.captureException(myException);

3. Using the result of an event capture:

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   alert(`Your exception was recorded as ${resultId}`);

init ideally allows several configuration methods. The first argument should always be the DSN value (if possible):

Sentry.init({
    'dsn': 'https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0',
    'foo': 'bar'
})

Additionally, you should provide global functions which allow for capturing of a basic message or exception:

• Sentry.captureMessage(message)
• Sentry.captureException(exception)

Parsing the DSN

SDKs are encouraged to allow arbitrary options via the constructor, but must allow the first argument as a DSN string. This string contains the following bits:

'{PROTOCOL}://{PUBLIC_KEY}:{SECRET_KEY}@{HOST}{PATH}/{PROJECT_ID}'

The final endpoint you’ll be sending requests to is constructed per the following:

 {BASE_URI} = '{PROTOCOL}://{HOST}{PATH}'

'{BASE_URI}/api/{PROJECT_ID}/{ENDPOINT}/'

Sentry provides the following endpoints:

• /envelope/ for any submission using Envelopes.
• /store/ for plain JSON event submission.
• /minidump/ for multipart requests containing Minidumps.
• /unreal/ for Unreal Engine 4 crash reports.
• /security/ for Browser CSP reports, usually configured in a browser instead of an SDK.

See the respective endpoints for information on how to compose proper request payloads.

For example, given the following constructor:

Sentry.init({dsn: 'https://public@sentry.example.com/1'})

You should parse the following settings:

• URI = https://sentry.example.com
• Public Key = public
• Project ID = 1

The resulting POST request for a plain JSON payload would then transmit to:

'https://sentry.example.com/api/1/store/'

Authentication

An authentication header is expected to be sent along with the message body, which acts as an ownership identifier:

X-Sentry-Auth: Sentry sentry_version=7,
  sentry_client=<client version, arbitrary>,
  sentry_timestamp=<current timestamp>,
  sentry_key=<public api key>,
  sentry_secret=<secret api key>

The sentry_secret must only be included if a secret key portion was contained in the DSN. Future versions of the protocol will fully deprecate the secret key.

In situations where it’s not possible to send the custom X-Sentry-Auth header, it’s possible to send these values via the querystring:

?sentry_version=7&sentry_key=<public api key>&sentry_secret=<secret api key>...

sentry_key

Required. The public key which should be provided as part of the SDK configuration.

sentry_version

Required. The protocol version. The current version of the protocol is 7.

sentry_client

An arbitrary string that identifies your SDK, including its version. The typical pattern for this is client_name/client_version.

For example, the Python SDK might send this as sentry.python/1.0.

sentry_timestamp

The unix timestamp representing the time at which this event was generated.

sentry_secret

The secret key which should be provided as part of the SDK configuration.

This key is effectively deprecated but for the time being should still be emitted by SDKs as some older Sentry versions required it in most situations. The secret key will be phased out entirely in future versions of Sentry.

HTTP Headers

We recommend always sending the following headers:

• content-type
• content-length

The following additional headers are permitted as per CORS policy:

• x-sentry-auth
• x-requested-with
• x-forwarded-for
• origin
• referer
• accept
• authentication
• authorization
• content-encoding
• transfer-encoding

Request Compression

SDKs are heavily encouraged to compress the request body before sending it to the server to keep the data small. The preferred method for this is to send a content-encoding header. The following content encodings are accepted by Relay and Sentry:

• gzip: Using the LZ77 compression algorithm.
• deflate: Using zlib structure with the deflate compression algorithm.
• br: Using the Brotli algorithm.

Transfer Encoding

Transfer encoding is recommended for only very large requests. Set the header to transfer-encoding: chunked, which allows omission of the content-length header and requires the request body to be wrapped into chunk headers.

See MDN for more details.

Reading the Response

On success, you will receive an HTTP response from the server containing a JSON payload with information on the submitted payload:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "id": "fc6d8c0c43fc4630ad850ee518f1b9d0"
}

Note the response code which Sentry will use. Always check for a 200 response, which confirms the message was delivered. A small level of validation happens immediately that may result in a different response code (and message).

Handling Errors

We highly encourage that your SDK handle failures from the Sentry server gracefully. Specifically, SDKs must honor the 429 status code and not attempt sending until the Retry-After kicks in. SDKs should drop events if Sentry is unavailable instead of retrying.

To debug an error during development, inspect the response headers and response body. For example, you may get a response similar to:

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Content-Type: application/json
X-Sentry-Error: failed to read request body

{
  "detail":"failed to read request body",
  "causes":[
    "failed to decode zlib payload",
    "corrupt deflate stream"
  ]
}

The X-Sentry-Error header and response body will not always contain a message, but they can still be helpful in debugging clients. When emitted, they will contain a precise error message, which is useful to identify root cause.

Concurrency (Scope and Hubs)

SDKs are supposed to provide standardized concurrency handling through the concept of hubs and scopes. This is explained in more details in the

Layer of Integration

SDKs when possible are supposed to integrate on a low level which will capture as much of the runtime as possible. This means that if an SDK can hook the runtime or a framework directly this is preferred over requiring users to subclass specific base classes (or mix in helpers). For instance the Python SDK will monkey patch core functionality in frameworks to automatically pick up on errors and to integrate scope handling.