Official Sentry SDK for C/C++

The Sentry Native SDK is an error and crash reporting client for native applications, optimized for C and C++. Sentry allows to add tags, breadcrumbs and arbitrary custom context to enrich error reports. Supports Sentry 20.6.0 and later.

Note

Using the sentry-native SDK in a standalone use case is currently an experimental feature. The SDK’s primary function is to fuel our other SDKs, like sentry-java or sentry-unreal. Support from our side is best effort and we do what we can to respond to issues in a timely fashion, but please understand if we won’t be able to address your issues or feature suggestions.

Resources

• SDK Documentation
• Discord server for project discussions
• Follow @getsentry on Twitter for updates

Table of Contents

• Downloads
  • What is Inside
• Platform and Feature Support
• Building and Installation
  • Compile-Time Options
  • Build Targets
• Runtime Configuration
• Known Limitations
• Development

Downloads

The SDK can be downloaded from the Releases page, which also lists the changelog of every version. We recommend using our release packages, but if you want to use this repo directly, please follow the contribution guide to understand the setup better.

What is Inside

The SDK bundle contains the following folders:

• include: Contains the Sentry header file. Set the include path to this directory or copy the header file to your source tree so that it is available during the build.
• src: Sources of the Sentry SDK required for building.
• ndk: Sources for the Android NDK JNI layer.
• external: These are vendored dependencies fetched via git submodules (use git submodule update --init --recursive if you use a git clone rather than a release).

Platform and Feature Support

The SDK currently supports and is tested on the following OS/Compiler variations:

• 64bit Linux with GCC 9
• 64bit Linux with clang 9
• 32bit Linux with GCC 7 (cross compiled from 64bit host)
• 32bit Windows with MSVC 2019
• 64bit Windows with MSVC 2022
• macOS Catalina with most recent Compiler toolchain
• Android API29 built by NDK21 toolchain
• Android API16 built by NDK19 toolchain

Additionally, the SDK should support the following platforms, although they are not automatically tested, so breakage may occur:

• Windows Versions lower than Windows 10 / Windows Server 2016
• Windows builds with the MSYS2 + MinGW + Clang toolchain

The SDK supports different features on the target platform:

• HTTP Transport is currently only supported on Windows and platforms that have the curl library available. On other platforms, library users need to implement their own transport, based on the function transport API.
• Crashpad Backend is currently only supported on Linux, Windows and macOS.
• Client-side stackwalking is currently only supported on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Building and Installation

The SDK is developed and shipped as a CMake project. CMake will pick an appropriate compiler and buildsystem toolchain automatically per platform, and can also be configured for cross-compilation. System-wide installation of the resulting sentry library is also possible via CMake.

The prerequisites for building differ depending on the platform and backend. You will always need CMake to build the code. Additionally, when using the crashpad backend, zlib is required. On Linux and macOS, libcurl is a prerequisite. For more details, check out the contribution guide.

Building the Crashpad Backend requires a C++20 compatible compiler. In particular, the standard library must support std::ranges for mini_chromium (a core library of crashpad).

Build example:

# configure the cmake build into the `build` directory, with crashpad (on macOS)
$ cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
# build the project
$ cmake --build build --parallel
# install the resulting artifacts into a specific prefix (use the correct config on windows)
$ cmake --install build --prefix install --config RelWithDebInfo
# which will result in the following (on macOS):
$ exa --tree install
install
├── bin
│  └── crashpad_handler
├── include
│  └── sentry.h
└── lib
   ├── cmake
   │  └── sentry
   ├── libsentry.dylib
   └── libsentry.dylib.dSYM

Please refer to the CMake Manual for more details.

Android:

The CMake project can also be configured to correctly work with the Android NDK, see the dedicated CMake Guide for details on how to integrate it with Gradle or use it on the command line.

The ndk folder provides Gradle project which adds a Java JNI layer for Android, suitable for accessing the sentry-native SDK from Java. See the NDK Readme for more details about this topic.

MinGW:

64-bits is the only platform supported for now. LLVM + Clang are mandatory here : they are required to generate .pdb files, used by Crashpad for the report generation.

For your application to generate the appropriate .pdb output, you need to activate CodeView file format generation on your application target. To do so, update your own CMakeLists.txt with something like target_compile_options(${yourApplicationTarget} PRIVATE -gcodeview).

If you use a MSYS2 environement to compile with MinGW, make sure to :

• Create an environement variable MINGW_ROOT (ex : C:/msys64/mingw64)
• Run from mingw64.exe : pacman -S --needed - < ./toolchains/msys2-mingw64-pkglist.txt
• Build as :

# Configure with Ninja as generator and use the MSYS2 toolchain file
$ cmake -GNinja -Bbuild -H. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=toolchains/msys2.cmake
# build with Ninja
$ ninja -C build

MacOS:

Building universal binaries/libraries is possible out of the box when using the CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES define, both with the Xcode generator as well as the default generator:

# using xcode generator:
$ cmake -B xcodebuild -GXcode -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="arm64;x86_64"
$ xcodebuild build -project xcodebuild/Sentry-Native.xcodeproj
$ lipo -info xcodebuild/Debug/libsentry.dylib
Architectures in the fat file: xcodebuild/Debug/libsentry.dylib are: x86_64 arm64

# using default generator:
$ cmake -B defaultbuild -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="arm64;x86_64"
$ cmake --build defaultbuild --parallel
$ lipo -info defaultbuild/libsentry.dylib
Architectures in the fat file: defaultbuild/libsentry.dylib are: x86_64 arm64

Make sure that MacOSX SDK 11 or later is used. It is possible that this requires manually overriding the SDKROOT:

$ export SDKROOT=$(xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-path)

Compile-Time Options

The following options can be set when running the cmake generator, for example using cmake -D BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF ...

• SENTRY_BUILD_SHARED_LIBS (Default: ON): By default, sentry is built as a shared library. Setting this option to OFF will build sentry as a static library instead. If sentry is used as a subdirectory of another project, the value BUILD_SHARED_LIBS will be inherited by default.

  When using sentry as a static library, make sure to #define SENTRY_BUILD_STATIC 1 before including the sentry header.

• SENTRY_PIC (Default: ON): By default, sentry is built as a position-independent library.

• SENTRY_EXPORT_SYMBOLS (Default: ON): By default, sentry exposes all symbols in the dynamic symbol table. You might want to disable it if the program intends to dlopen third-party shared libraries and avoid symbol collisions.

• SENTRY_BUILD_RUNTIMESTATIC (Default: OFF): Enables linking with the static MSVC runtime. Has no effect if the compiler is not MSVC.

• SENTRY_LINK_PTHREAD (Default: ON): Links platform threads library like pthread on UNIX targets.

• SENTRY_BUILD_FORCE32 (Default: OFF): Forces cross-compilation from 64-bit host to 32-bit target. Only affects Linux.

• CMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION (Default: depending on Windows SDK version): Sets up a minimal version of Windows where sentry-native can be guaranteed to run. Possible values:

  • 5.1 (Windows XP)
  • 5.2 (Windows XP 64-bit / Server 2003 / Server 2003 R2)
  • 6.0 (Windows Vista / Server 2008)
  • 6.1 (Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2)
  • 6.2 (Windows 8.0 / Server 2012)
  • 6.3 (Windows 8.1 / Server 2012 R2)
  • 10 (Windows 10 / Server 2016 / Server 2019)

  For Windows versions below than 6.0 it is also necessary to use XP toolchain in case of MSVC compiler (pass -T v141_xp to CMake command line).

• SENTRY_TRANSPORT (Default: depending on platform): Sentry can use different http libraries to send reports to the server.

  • curl: This uses the curl library for HTTP handling. This requires that the development version of the package is available.
  • winhttp: This uses the winhttp system library, is only supported on Windows and is the default there.
  • none: Do not build any http transport. This should be used if users want to handle uploads themselves

• SENTRY_BACKEND (Default: depending on platform): Sentry can use different backends depending on platform.

  • crashpad: This uses the out-of-process crashpad handler. It is currently only supported on Desktop OSs, and used as the default on Windows, Linux and macOS.
  • breakpad: This uses the in-process breakpad handler. It is currently only supported on Desktop OSs.
  • inproc: A small in-process handler that is supported on all platforms, and is used as a default on Android.
  • none: This builds sentry-native without a backend, so it does not handle crashes. It is primarily used for tests.

• SENTRY_INTEGRATION_QT (Default: OFF): Builds the Qt integration, which turns Qt log messages into breadcrumbs.

• SENTRY_BREAKPAD_SYSTEM (Default: OFF): This instructs the build system to use system-installed breakpad libraries instead of the in-tree version.

• SENTRY_TRANSPORT_COMPRESSION (Default: OFF): Adds Gzip transport compression. Requires zlib.

• SENTRY_FOLDER (Default: not defined): Sets the sentry-native projects folder name for generators that support project hierarchy (like Microsoft Visual Studio). To use this feature, you need to enable hierarchy via USE_FOLDERS property

• CRASHPAD_ENABLE_STACKTRACE (Default: OFF): This enables client-side stackwalking when using the crashpad backend. Stack unwinding will happen on the client's machine and the result will be submitted to Sentry attached to the generated minidump. Note that this feature is still experimental.

• SENTRY_SDK_NAME (Default: sentry.native or sentry.native.android): Sets the SDK name that should be included in the reported events. If you're overriding this, also define the same value using target_compile_definitions() on your own targets that include sentry.h.

Support Matrix

Feature	Windows	macOS	Linux	Android	iOS
Transports
- curl		☑	☑	(✓)***
- winhttp	☑
- none	✓	✓	✓	☑	☑
Backends
- crashpad	☑	☑	☑
- breakpad	✓	✓	✓	(✓)**	(✓)**
- inproc	✓	(✓)*	✓	☑
- none	✓	✓	✓	✓

Legend:

• ☑ default
• ✓ supported
• (✓) supported with limitations
• *: inproc has not produced valid stack traces on macOS since version 13 ("Ventura"). Tracking: #906
• **: breakpad on Android and iOS builds and should work according to upstream but is untested.
• ***: curl as a transport works on Android but isn't used in any supported configuration to reduce the size of our artifacts.

In addition to platform support, the "Advanced Usage" section of the SDK docs now describes the tradeoffs involved in choosing a suitable backend for a particular use case.

Build Targets

• sentry: This is the main library and the only default build target.
• crashpad_handler: When configured with the crashpad backend, this is the out of process crash handler, which will need to be installed along with the projects executable.
• sentry_test_unit: These are the main unit-tests, which are conveniently built also by the toplevel makefile.
• sentry_example: This is a small example program highlighting the API, which can be controlled via command-line parameters, and is also used for integration tests.

Runtime Configuration

A minimal working example looks like this. For a more elaborate example see the example.c file which is also used to run sentries integration tests.

sentry_options_t *options = sentry_options_new();
sentry_options_set_dsn(options, "https://YOUR_KEY@oORG_ID.ingest.sentry.io/PROJECT_ID");
sentry_init(options);

// your application code …

sentry_close();

Other important configuration options include:

• sentry_options_set_database_path: Sentry needs to persist some cache data across application restarts, especially for proper handling of release health sessions. It is recommended to set an explicit absolute path corresponding to the applications cache directory (equivalent to AppData/Local on Windows, and XDG_CACHE_HOME on Linux). Sentry should be given its own directory which is not shared with other application data, as the SDK will enumerate and possibly delete files in that directory. An example might be $XDG_CACHE_HOME/your-app/sentry. When not set explicitly, sentry will create and use the .sentry-native directory inside of the current working directory.
• sentry_options_set_handler_path: When using the crashpad backend, sentry will look for a crashpad_handler executable in the same directory as the running executable. It is recommended to set this as an explicit absolute path based on the applications install location.
• sentry_options_set_release: Some features in sentry, including release health, need to have a release version set. This corresponds to the application’s version and needs to be set explicitly. See Releases for more information.

Known Limitations

• The crashpad backend on macOS currently has no support for notifying the crashing process, and can thus not properly terminate sessions or call the registered before_send or on_crash hook. It will also lose any events that have been queued for sending at time of crash.
• The Crashpad backend on Windows supports fast-fail crashes, which bypass SEH (Structured Exception Handling) primarily for security reasons. sentry-native registers a WER (Windows Error Reporting) module, which signals the crashpad_handler to send a minidump when a fast-fail crash occurs But since this process bypasses SEH, the application local exception handler is no longer invoked, which also means that for these kinds of crashes, before_send and on_crash will not be invoked before sending the minidump and thus have no effect.

Development

Please see the contribution guide.