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Spotlight
by Sentry

About Spotlight

Spotlight started out as a Hackweek project at Sentry:

Spotlight is Sentry for Development. Inspired by an old project, Django Debug Toolbar, Spotlight brings a rich debug overlay into development environments, and it does it by leveraging the existing power of Sentry’s SDKs.

You get the power of Sentry’s telemetry (through its SDKs) without needing Sentry’s production monitoring. If you already use Sentry, that’s great. All you need is enabling Spotlight in your SDK and run Spotlight. If you are not using Sentry, you need to install the free and open source Sentry SDKs to get started. If you want to use Sentry later on, this saves you the initial setup. Just add your Sentry DSNs into your projects and off you go!

Spotlight can show you errors, traces (including distributed traces), profiling data, configurations settings, installed dependencies, you name it. Spotlight is developed with customizablity in mind, so you can add your own integrations to it. The main differences between Spotlight and Sentry are:

  1. Spotlight runs locally on your system
  2. Spotlight shows you everything and in realtime whereas Sentry is all about aggregation
  3. Spotlight is completely free and open source, whereas Sentry is a commercial product (with a free tier and self-hosting options)

Quick Start

If you are already using Sentry SDKs in your application try the following:

  1. Set SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT=1 in your env1
  2. Run npx @spotlightjs/spotlight2
  3. Run your application
  4. Go to http://localhost:8969
  5. Observe the traces and errors coming to your local Spotlight instance

Footnotes

  1. Currently Python, Ruby, PHP, and all JS-based SDKs support this env variable. If your choice of SDK doesn’t support it, you can still use Spotlight by enabling the spotlight option in its init configuration. Also you can let us know of your interest and we’ll add support for the env variable. ↩

  2. If you don’t have npx around, you can use docker run -p 8969 ghcr.io/getsentry/spotlight:latest, or head over to our GitHub Releases page and download a binary for your system. Alternatively, we provide an Electron-based application that can be used to run the Sidecar as well as a dedicated instance of the overlay. There are some limitations to this method, but it is particularly useful for headless or mobile environments.

    macOS (Apple Silicon) macOS (Intel)
    latest version: 1.7.0
    ↩