Self-hosting Sentry With Docker and Docker-compose

If a user encounters an error but you don’t know about, did it happen at all?

Sentry is one of the several options for error tracking across many platforms and languages. Sentry has a great free option for 10,000 errors per month and a single user, but they also offer a self-hosted option that is 100% free. This post aims to help you configure your own installation of Sentry using docker-compose.

Assumptions

I will start by assuming that you have Docker and docker-compose installed and working. It would also be great if you had some experience with both of these.

Instructions

For your convenience I am providing a zip with the 3 files I describe below. It cannot just be executed ‘as-is’ you must make the configuration changes described in this post. sentry_docker_7_2019.zip

Save the following file as docker-compose.yml. It tells docker what containers to create and what environment variables to use when running them. Fill in the missing portions. The containers are configured to save their data to /srv/sentry so you may need to create this path or choose a different path.

version: '3'

services:
  # OPTIONAL: If you want to get emails from sentry include this docker container
  smtp:
    image: 'tianon/exim4:latest'
    environment:
      GMAIL_USER: 'GMAIL_USER@gmail.com'
      GMAIL_PASSWORD: 'GMAIL_PASSWORD_OR_GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD'

  sentry-base:
    image: 'sentry:latest'
    container_name: sentry-base
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - sentry-redis
      - sentry-postgres
    links:
      - sentry-redis
      - sentry-postgres
    ports:
      - 880:9000
    env_file:
      - sentry.env
    volumes:
      - /srv/sentry/sentry:/var/lib/sentry/files
#      - /srv/sentry/etc:/etc/sentry
# Uncomment the line above if using the GitHub plugin

  sentry-cron:
    image: 'sentry:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - sentry-base
    links:
      - sentry-redis
      - sentry-postgres
    command: "sentry run cron"
    env_file:
      - sentry.env
    volumes:
      - /srv/sentry/sentry:/var/lib/sentry/files
#      - /srv/sentry/etc:/etc/sentry
# Uncomment the line above if using the GitHub plugin

  sentry-worker:
    image: 'sentry:latest'
    depends_on:
      - sentry-base
    links:
      - sentry-redis
      - sentry-postgres
    command: "sentry run worker"
    env_file:
      - sentry.env
    volumes:
      - /srv/sentry/sentry:/var/lib/sentry/files
#      - /srv/sentry/etc:/etc/sentry
# Uncomment the line above if using the GitHub plugin


  sentry-redis:
    image: 'redis:latest'
  sentry-postgres:
    image: 'postgres:latest'
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: sentry
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: sentry
      POSTGRES_DB: sentry 
    volumes:
      - /srv/sentry/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Next, save the environment variables file as sentry.env and edit it as appropriate.

# OPTIONAL: Include if you're using email
SENTRY_EMAIL_HOST=smtp

SENTRY_POSTGRES_HOST=sentry-postgres
SENTRY_DB_USER=sentry
SENTRY_DB_PASSWORD=sentry
SENTRY_REDIS_HOST=sentry-redis

# OPTIONAL: Include if Sentry is available over HTTPS
SOCIAL_AUTH_REDIRECT_IS_HTTPS=true
SENTRY_SECRET_KEY=

If you want to use GitHub integration follow the steps below, otherwise skip ahead.

GitHub Integration

1. Make a new GitHub application at this link and enter in an application name.
   • Set “Homepage URL” to the web root of your Sentry install.
   • “User authorization callback URL” and “Setup URL (optional)” should both be set to “https://<URL>/extensions/github/setup/”.
   • “Webhook URL” should be set to “https://<URL>/extensions/github/webhook/”
   • Come up with a webhook secret and save it elsewhere, you’ll need it in the next step
   • Finish creating the app and then create a new private key for it
2. Download sentry.conf.py from GitHub and save it into /srv/sentry/etc/sentry.conf.py
3. Create config.yml in /srv/sentry/etc/config.yml
   • Fill in the following keys with values from the GitHub app
   • github-app.id: <GitHub App Id>
   • github-app.name: <GitHub App Name>
   • github-app.webhook-secret: <Webhook secret>
   • github-app.client-id: <GitHub App Client ID>
   • github-app.client-secret: <GitHub App Client Secret>
   • github-app.private-key: “<Private key with no spaces and with new lines replaced by ‘\n’>”
4. If your Sentry will be accessible over HTTPS, include the optional environment variable “SOCIAL_AUTH_REDIRECT_IS_HTTPS” in sentry.env.

Bringing up the service for the first time

Automatic Script

Utilize the script below or manually type the commands to generate a new secret key, build the database, and start the service.

#!/bin/bash

# Generate a random secret key and put it into the environment variable file
sed -i "$ s/$/$(docker-compose run --rm sentry-base sentry config generate-secret-key)/" sentry.env

# Run database migrations (build the database)
docker-compose run --rm sentry-base sentry upgrade --noinput

# Startup the whole service
docker-compose up -d

Save this file as sentry-install.sh and then make it executable by running chmod +x sentry-install.sh. Next, run the file by doing ./sentry-install.sh. This file will write a new secret key to the sentry.env file, so it is important that it is named in that way and that there are no additional lines after the “SENTRY_SECRET_KEY=”.

Manually

To do this all manually, run docker-compose exec sentry-base sentry config generate-secret-key and put the output into the sentry.env file as “SENTRY_SECRET_KEY”.

Next, run docker-compose exec sentry-base sentry upgrade which will initialize the postgres database. This command will need to be run every time the Sentry docker image is updated.

Finally, use docker-compose up -d to bring up the service.

If you ran the commands above manually, then you’re done. If you used the script however, the service is up but there is no administrator.

Create the Administrator Account

Use the following command to create the administrator.

docker-compose exec sentry-base sentry createuser --email YOUR_EMAIL --password YOUR_NEW_PASSWORD --superuser --no-input