Will Kahn-Greene: Kent v0.1.0 released! And the story of Kent in the first place....

What is it?

Before explaining what it is, I want to talk about Why.

A couple of years ago, we migrated from the Raven Sentry client (Python) to sentry-sdk. One of the things we did was implement our own sanitization code which removed personally identifyable information and secret information (as best as possible) from error reports.

I find the documentation for writing sanitization filters really confusing. before_send? before_breadcrumb? When do those hooks kick off? What does an event look like? There's a link to a page that describes an event, but there's a lot of verbiage and no schema so it's not wildly clear what the errors my application is sending look like. 1

Anyhow, so when we switched to sentry-sdk, we implemented some sanitization code because while Raven had some code, sentry-sdk did not. Then at some point between then and now, the sanitization code stopped working. It's my fault probably. I bet something changed in the sentry-sdk and I didn't notice.

Why didn't I notice? Am I a crappy engineer? Sure, but in this case the problem here is that the sanitization code runs in the context of handling an unhandled error. In handling the unhandled error, Sentry passes the event through our broken sanitization code and that throws an exception. Nothing gets sent to Sentry--neither the original error nor the sanitization error.

Once I realized there were errors, I looked in the logs and I can see the original errors--but not the sanitization errors.

Note

Fun fact: turns out John Whitlock thought about this when he wrote the sanitization code and added some code to emit a metric if the sanitization code errors out. If I had a graph in the dashboard showing this metric, I would have seen it.

"You should test your sanitization code!" you say! Right on! That's what we should be doing! We have unit tests but they run with ficticious data in a pocket dimension. So they passed wonderfully despite the issue!

What we needed was a few things:

1. I needed to be able to run a fake Sentry service that I could throw errors at and debug the sanitization code in my local environment without having to spin up a real Sentry instance

2. I needed to be able to see exactly what is in the error payloads for my application.

3. I needed something I can use for integration tests with the sentry-sdk.

That's how I ended up putting aside all the things I needed to do and built Kent.

1

I don't intend to bash Sentry and the Sentry folks and all the work they do. Their docs may be great. I'm probably the dumb one here.

So what is Kent?

Kent is a fake Sentry service. You can run it, set the Sentry DSN of your application to soemthing like http://public@localhost:8000/1, and then Kent will capture Sentry error reports.

Kent takes 2 seconds to set up. You can run it locally:

$ pip install kent
$ kent-server run

You can run it in a Docker container. There's a sample Dockerfile in the repo.

It doesn't require databases, credentials, caching, or any of that stuff.

Kent stores things in-memory. You don't have to clean up after it.

Kent has a website letting you view errors with your browser.

Kent has an API letting you build integration tests that create the errors and then fetch them and assert things against them.

What questionable architectural decisions did you make?

I built it with Flask. Flask is great for stuff like this--that part is fine.

The part that's less fine is that I decided to put in the least amount of effort in standing it up as a service and putting it behind a real WSGI server, so I'm (ab)using Flask's cli and monkeypatching werkzeug to not print out "helpful" (but in this case--unhelpful) messages to the console.

I used pico.css because I read about it like yesterday and it seemed easier to use that than to go fiddling with CSS frameworks to get a really lovely looking site for a fake Sentry service.

I may replace that at some point with something that involves less horizontal space.

I only wrote one test. I have testing set up, but only wrote one test to make sure it's minimally viable. I may write more at some point.

I only tested with Python sentry-sdk. I figure if other people need it, they can let me know what else it works with and we can fix any issues that come up.

I decided to store errors in memory rather than persist things to disk. That was easy to do and seems like the right move. Maybe we'll hit something that requires us to do something different.

I named it Kent. I like short names. Friends suggested I name it Caerbannog because it was a sentry of a sort. I love that name, but I can't reliably spell it.

0.1.0 released!

I thought about making this 1.0.0, but then decided to put it into the world and use it for a bit and fix any issues that come up and then release 1.0.0.

Initial release with minimally viable feature set.

• capture errors and keep them in memory

• API endpoint to list errors

• API endpoint to fetch error

Where to go for more

History of releases: https://github.com/willkg/kent/blob/main/HISTORY.rst

Source code, issue tracker, documentation, and quickstart here: https://github.com/willkg/kent

Let me know how this helps you!

I say that in a lot of my posts. "Let me know how this helps you!" or "Comment by sending me an email!" or something like that. I occasionally get a response--usually from Sumana--but most often, it's me talking to the void. I do an awful lot of work that theoretically positively affects thousands of people to be constantly talking to the void.

Let me know if you have positive or negative feelings about Kent by:

1. click on this link: https://github.com/willkg/kent/issues/3

2. add a reaction to the description which should be like two clicks

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