Sending Events

The sentry-cli tool can also be used for sending events. If you want to use it, you need to export the SENTRY_DSN environment variable and point it to the DSN of a project of yours:

export SENTRY_DSN='https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0'

Once that is done, you can start using the sentry-cli send-event command.

Basic Events

For basic message events, you just need to provide the --message or -m parameter to send a message:

sentry-cli send-event -m "Hello from Sentry"

This will send a single message to Sentry and record it as an event. Along with that event, it sends basic information about the machine you are running sentry-cli on. You can provide -m multiple times to send multiple lines:

sentry-cli send-event -m "Hello from Sentry" -m "This is more text"

Events with Parameters

In addition you can use %s as placeholder in a message and fill it in with the -a parameter. This helps reviewing them, as all messages will be grouped together automatically:

sentry-cli send-event -m "Hello %s!" -a "Joe"
sentry-cli send-event -m "Hello %s!" -a "Peter"

Sending Breadcrumbs

You can also pass a logfile to the send-event command which will be parsed and sent along as breadcrumbs. The last 100 items will be sent:

sentry-cli send-event -m “task failed” –-logfile error.log

The logfile can be in various formats. If you want to create one yourself you can do something along those lines:

echo "$(date +%c) This is a log record" >> output.log
echo "$(date +%c) This is another record" >> output.log
sentry-cli send-event -m "Demo Event" --logfile output.log
rm output.log

Extra Data

Extra data can be attached with the -e parameter as KEY:VALUE. For instance, you can send some key value pairs like this:

sentry-cli send-event -m "a failure" -e task:create-user -e object:42

Likewise, tags can be sent with -t using the same format:

sentry-cli send-event -m "a failure" -t task:create-user

Stored Events

As of version 1.71, the send-event command can accept an optional argument that specifies a path to the stored JSON representation of an event. When used, it will load the file, validate the event and send it to Sentry.

sentry-cli send-event ./events/20211029150006.json

This argument can be also provided in the form of a glob, which will cause it to process all matched events.

sentry-cli send-event "./events/*.json"

If send-event is called with the --raw flag, the event will not be validated before being sent.

sentry-cli send-event --raw ./events/20211029150006.json

Specifying Releases

Releases can be sent with the --release parameter. A default release is picked up automatically if you are using sentry-cli from within a git repository.

Bash Hook

For bash scripts you can also enable automatic error sending by using the sentry-cli bash hook. That enables set -e and will send a Sentry event for unhandled errors.

The limitations for this are:

• sentry-cli really only works if set -e is enabled (which it will by default enable for you).
• sentry-cli registers an EXIT and ERR trap.

Usage:

#!/bin/bash
export SENTRY_DSN='https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0'
eval "$(sentry-cli bash-hook)"
# rest of the script goes here

Alternatively you can use other mechanisms like a .sentryclirc file to configure the DSN.