How to contribute to the Sentry Python SDK

sentry-sdk is an ordinary Python package. You can install it with pip install -e . into some virtualenv, edit the sourcecode and test out your changes manually.

Community

The public-facing channels for support and development of Sentry SDKs can be found on Discord.

Running tests and linters

Make sure you have virtualenv installed, and the Python versions you care about. You should have Python 2.7 and the latest Python 3 installed.

We have a Makefile that is supposed to help people get started with hacking on the SDK without having to know or understand the Python ecosystem. You don't need to workon or bin/activate anything, the Makefile will do everything for you. Run make or make help to list commands.

Of course you can always run the underlying commands yourself, which is particularly useful when wanting to provide arguments to pytest to run specific tests. If you want to do that, we expect you to know your way around Python development, and you can run the following to get started with pytest:

# This is "advanced mode". Use `make help` if you have no clue what's
# happening here!

pip install -e .
pip install -r test-requirements.txt

pytest tests/

Releasing a new version

We use craft to release new versions. You need credentials for the getsentry PyPI user, and must have twine installed globally.

The usual release process goes like this:

Go through git log and write new entry into CHANGES.md, commit to master
craft p a.b.c
craft pp a.b.c

Adding a new integration (checklist)

Write the integration.
- Instrument all application instances by default. Prefer global signals/patches instead of configuring a specific instance. Don't make the user pass anything to your integration for anything to work. Aim for zero configuration.
- Everybody monkeypatches. That means:
  - Make sure to think about conflicts with other monkeypatches when monkeypatching.
  - You don't need to feel bad about it.
- Avoid modifying the hub, registering a new client or the like. The user drives the client, and the client owns integrations.
- Allow the user to disable the integration by changing the client. Check Hub.current.get_integration(MyIntegration) from within your signal handlers to see if your integration is still active before you do anything impactful (such as sending an event).
Write tests.
- Think about the minimum versions supported, and test each version in a separate env in tox.ini.
- Create a new folder in tests/integrations/, with an __init__ file that skips the entire suite if the package is not installed.
Update package metadata.
- We use extras_require in setup.py to communicate minimum version requirements for integrations. People can use this in combination with tools like Poetry or Pipenv to detect conflicts between our supported versions and their used versions programmatically.
  
  Do not set upper-bounds on version requirements as people are often faster in adopting new versions of a web framework than we are in adding them to the test matrix or our package metadata.
Write the docs. Answer the following questions:
- What does your integration do? Split in two sections: Executive summary at top and exact behavior further down.
- Which version of the SDK supports which versions of the modules it hooks into?
- One code example with basic setup.
- Make sure to add integration page to python/index.md (people forget to do that all the time).

Tip: Put most relevant parts wrapped in .. tags for usage from within the Sentry UI.

Merge docs after new version has been released (auto-deploys on merge).
(optional) Update data in sdk_updates.py to give users in-app suggestions to use your integration. May not be applicable or doable for all kinds of integrations.