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How to configure Sentry with Electron Forge

2021-08-05

2 min.

Trying to get an electron-forge-based Electron app running is already a task not for the faint of heart. Many worlds are colliding, including the new Electron security practices, Chromium, Node, and the differences between platforms. Add to this the @sentry/electron package, and everything gets messier yet.

** if you use contextIsolation:true**

After spending a day trying to get Sentry working, these are my discoveries:

Add both sentry/electron and sentry/react packages

yarn add @sentry/electron @sentry/react

or

npm i @sentry/electron @sentry/react --save

Call Sentry.init from the @sentry/electron package on your main process

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/electron"


Sentry.init({ dsn: <your dsn> });

Call Sentry.init from the @sentry/electron/dist/renderer package on your preload and renderer scripts

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/electron/dist/renderer"


Sentry.init({ dsn: <your dsn> });

notice that the import sentence uses dist/renderer

This will catch errors on the Ipc side that has access to the 'electron' package but not on React views (if you are using the react/webpack template for example).

Use sentry/react in your context isolated views

This was one tricky... I found about this somewhere in Sentry's Github:

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/react"


function FallbackComponent() {
  return <div>An error has ocurred :(</div>
}
export default function App() {
  return (
    <Sentry.ErrorBoundary fallback={FallbackComponent} showDialog>
      <YourMainComponent />
    </Sentry.ErrorBoundary>
  )
}

Set electron as an external dependency in the renderer webpack config

  externals: {
    electron: "commonjs electron",
  },

If you don't do this, electron-forge start will crash with a nasty and unrelated error message.

There is some stuff left... yet

This will get you something workable, but there is some stuff missing, like sourcemaps., maybe if I have another day to waste.

Good this is that they are aware of this mess: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-electron/issues/360 so there is hope 🙏

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