Frontend monitoring is a crucial part of running online ecommerce stores. Although in a Agency context, a lot of the SaaS options can get expensive quickly especially for smaller merchants. By self hosting Sentry, we can elevate a lot of this cost.

We are using Hetzner as our host, due to the low cost and high specs of some machines in their server Auction. The machine specs in particular are: 14C/20T 2.5GHz i5-13500, 64GB Ram, 2TB Raid, Ubuntu 22

The official Sentry Self Hosted Docs cover setup, recommended specs, and configure fairly well even if the docs are a little bit jumbled at times.

Server Configuration

Installation is pretty simple, first install docker & docker compose on the machine.

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install docker-ce docker-compose-plugin
sudo systemctl enable --now docker

Next clone the sentry self hosted repository into the installation path on the machine (we are going to use /opt/sentry)

mkdir -p /opt/sentry
git clone https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted.git /opt/sentry
cd /opt/sentry
git checkout 24.1.0
# Make any changes to the configuration files under
# /opt/sentry/sentry/config.yml - e.g Google SSO, Slack/Discord Tokens,
# /opt/sentry/sentry/sentry.conf.py - e.g Single Org Mode, Sentry Features, Bitbucket Tokens,
sudo ./install.sh --report-self-hosted-issues
docker compose restart

Next you can look into configuring a cron to backup the sentry server regularly