May 2016 Summaries

Breadcrumbs in PHP are a trail of events leading up to the primary error, providing critical context that can help reproduce steps and debug issues. The Sentry PHP SDK now supports native breadcrumb tracking, allowing developers to attach metadata such as network requests, database queries, or UI events to errors. To get started, ensure you're running the latest version of the SDK, then use the `record` method to capture breadcrumbs in your application. Automated instrumentation is available through integration with Monolog and the native error_reporting hook, enabling developers to easily implement breadcrumb tracking in their PHP applications. As the feature enters its early phase, Sentry invites feedback and encourages developers to open issues on the public GitHub repository.

Sentry is partnering with Linode to celebrate the start of PyCon, which will take place at Ground Kontrol on May 30th from 7:30-9:30 PM. The event aims to provide an opportunity for attendees to discuss error tracking in Python and Django using Sentry.

Sentry has partnered with Atlassian to create a seamless integration with their Bitbucket Pipelines service, allowing developers to easily track releases and identify potential issues in production. The integration simplifies deployment for Bitbucket users by automatically notifying Sentry when new releases are pushed out. By leveraging this partnership, developers can quickly pinpoint the cause of errors and resolve issues before they affect users. With the ability to upload source maps through Pipelines, legible stack traces can be generated, making it easier to debug and diagnose problems. The integration is designed to make deployment more efficient and reliable, especially for teams practicing continuous deployment.

Breadcrumbs in Sentry's Python SDK provide a trail of events leading up to the primary error, offering rich metadata about application state such as network requests, database queries, UI events, navigation changes, or earlier occurring errors. Breadcrumbs can help reproduce steps that led to an error and add critical context to errors beyond what stack traces alone offer. The Python SDK supports various events, including internal RPC calls, HTTP requests, logging entries, and SQL queries. Automated instrumentation captures common loggers like `httplib`, `urlib`, and `requests` as well as Django ORM SQL queries, but users can also customize filtering using the `breadcrumbs.ignore_logger()` method. As Sentry continues to evolve, new levels of data will be added to Python error monitoring through Breadcrumbs, offering a significant enhancement to the platform.

To help developers understand the issue of "Script Error" when dealing with cross-origin scripts, browsers intentionally hide errors originating from script files from different origins for security reasons. However, there are potential reasons why insight into these errors is necessary, such as serving JavaScript files from a different hostname or using libraries served from community CDNs. To get visibility into these errors, developers can add CORS attributes and headers to the scripts, which allows browsers to fetch the file without transmitting potentially user-identifying information. Alternatively, they can use try/catch blocks to wrap 3rd-party code and capture error messages and stack traces. This approach is recommended when trying to fix script errors caused by cross-origin scripts.

The sentry-symfony package provides native integration for Symfony applications to log errors with Sentry, allowing developers to track and manage errors in a centralized manner. The integration is now available via Composer, enabling easy installation and configuration of the bundle. To get started, simply install the package, enable it in the application kernel, and add your DSN to the configuration file. Developers can learn more about the implementation details and additional usage information by visiting the sentry-symfony project on GitHub.

Breadcrumbs` are a trail of events that occurred in an application leading up to the primary error, providing critical context to errors that a stack trace alone can't provide. Breadcrumbs have been found to be incredibly helpful in reproducing the steps that led to the error being debugged. Sentry has recently introduced support for breadcrumbs on multiple platforms including browser JavaScript, Python, and PHP, with more platforms on the way. The introduction of breadcrumbs is part of Sentry's ongoing effort to help developers quickly fix issues by providing a trail of events leading up to the primary error.

Cameron McEfee has joined the design team as an additional member, bringing his expertise from creative director at GitHub and creator of GuideGuide extension for Photoshop. He will be working on product and marketing, content development, and messaging. Previously, he had a notable impact by making Octocat a household name and creating the most installed extension for Photoshop. In his free time, Cameron enjoys cooking unique meals.