Troubleshooting Source Maps

Setting up source maps can be tricky, but it's worth it to get it right. To troubleshoot your source maps set up, you can either:

  1. Use our automated verification tool inside sentry-cli, or
  2. Follow the manual steps listed below

To use the automated verification process, install and configure the Sentry Command Line Interface. Then, use the sourcemaps explain command, calling it with the relevant event ID, found in the top-left corner of the Issue Details page in sentry.io.

For example, "Event ID: c2ad049f":

Image highlighting where to find the ID of an event on Sentry

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sentry-cli sourcemaps explain c2ad049fd9e448ada7849df94575e019

The CLI output should give you useful information about what went wrong with your source maps setup.

For uploaded source maps to be located and applied, the release needs to be created by the CLI or API (and the correct artifacts uploaded with it), and the name of that newly-created release needs to be specified in your SDK configuration.

To verify this, open up the issue from the Sentry UI and check if the release is configured. If it says "not configured" or "N/A" next to Release on the right hand side of the screen (or if you do not see a release tag in the list of tags), you'll need to go back and tag your errors. If this is properly set up you'll see "Release: my_example_release".

Once your release is properly configured and issues are tagged, you can find the artifacts uploaded to Sentry by navigating to [Settings] > Projects > Select your project > Source Maps.

Additionally, make sure all of the necessary files are available. For Sentry to de-minify your stack traces you must provide both the minified files (for example, app.min.js) and the corresponding source maps. In case the source map files do not contain your original source code (sourcesContent), you must additionally provide the original source files. Alternatively, sentry-cli will automatically embed the sources (if missing) into your source maps.

Some CDNs automatically strip comments from static files, including JavaScript files. This can have the effect of stripping your JavaScript file of its sourceMappingURL directive, because it is considered a comment. For example, CloudFlare has a feature called Auto-Minify which will strip sourceMappingURL if it is enabled.

Double-check that your deployed, final JavaScript files have sourceMappingURL present.

Alternately, instead of sourceMappingURL, you can set a SourceMap HTTP header on your minified file. If this header is present, Sentry will use it to discover the location of your source map.

Whenever you are using a distribution identifier (the dist configuration option in the SDK), the same value has to be used during source map upload. Conversely, if your source maps are getting uploaded with a dist value, the same value must be set in your SDK. To add a dist value to your uploaded source maps, use the --dist flag with sentry-cli or the dist option in our Sentry Bundler Plugins (like for example @sentry/webpack-plugin). To set the dist value in the SDK, use the dist option in your Sentry.init().

To verify that the distribution has been set correctly in the SDK, open an issue in the Sentry UI and check that the dist tag is present. For artifacts, go to the Source Maps page in project settings, choose the release shown on the event you just checked, and verify that the dist value (in the small oval next to the upload time) matches that on the event.

If you've uploaded source maps and they aren't applying to your code in an issue in Sentry, take a look at the JSON of the event and look for the abs_path to see exactly where we're attempting to resolve the file - for example, http://localhost:8000/scripts/script.js (abs_path will appear once for each frame in the stack trace - match this up with the file(s) that are not deminified.). A link to the JSON view can be found at the top of the issue page next to the date the event occurred. The uploaded artifact names must match these values.

If you have dynamic values in your path (for example, https://www.site.com/{some_value}/scripts/script.js), you may want to use the rewriteFrames integration to change your abs_path values.

If your sourceMappingURL comment is similar to:

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// -- end script.min.js (located at http://localhost:8000/scripts/script.min.js)
// sourceMappingURL=script.min.js.map

An example sentry-cli command to upload these files correctly would look like this (assuming you're in the /scripts directory, running your web server from one directory higher, which is why we're using the --url-prefix option):

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sentry-cli releases files VERSION upload-sourcemaps . --url-prefix '~/scripts'

This command uploads all JavaScript files in the current directory. The Artifacts page in Sentry should now look like:

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~/scripts/script.js
~/scripts/script.min.js
~/scripts/script.min.js.map

Alternately you can specify which files to upload. For example:

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sentry-cli releases files VERSION upload-sourcemaps script.min.js script.min.js.map --url-prefix '~/scripts'

You can also upload it with the fully qualified URL. For example:

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sentry-cli releases files VERSION upload-sourcemaps . --url-prefix 'http://localhost:8000/scripts'

You can alternately use our API to upload artifacts, following the same naming convention explained here.

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curl -X POST \
  https://sentry.io/api/0/organizations/ORG_SLUG/releases/VERSION/files/ \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer AUTH_TOKEN' \
  -H 'content-type: multipart/form-data' \
  -F file=@script.min.js.map \
  -F 'name=~/scripts/script.min.js.map'

The ~ is used in Sentry to replace the scheme and domain. It is not a glob!

http://example.com/dist/js/script.js will match ~/dist/js/script.js or http://example.com/dist/js/script.js

but will NOT match ~/script.js.

It's not uncommon for a web application to be accessible at multiple origins. For example:

  • Website is operable over both https and http
  • Geolocated web addresses: such as https://us.example.com, https://eu.example.com
  • Multiple static CDNs: such as https://static1.example.com, https://static2.example.com
  • Customer-specific domains/subdomains

In this situation, identical JavaScript and source map files may be located at two or more distinct origins. In this situation we recommend using our special tilde (~) prefix on paths.

So for example, if you have the following:

You can upload using the URL of ~/js/app.js. This will tell Sentry to ignore the domain and use the artifact for any origin.

Additionally you can also upload the same file under multiple names. Under the hood Sentry will deduplicate these.

The sourceMappingURL comment on the last line of your bundled or minified JavaScript file tells Sentry (or the browser) where to locate the corresponding source map. This can either be a fully qualified URL, a relative path, or the filename itself. When uploading artifacts to Sentry, you must name your source map files with the value the file resolves to.

That is, if your file is similar to:

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// -- end script.min.js
// sourceMappingURL=script.min.js.map

and is hosted at http://example.com/js/script.min.js, then Sentry will look for that source map file at http://example.com/js/script.min.js.map. Your uploaded artifact must therefore be named http://example.com/js/script.min.js.map (or ~/js/script.min.js.map).

Or, if your file is similar to:

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//-- end script.min.js
// sourceMappingURL=https://example.com/dist/js/script.min.js.map

then your uploaded artifact should also be named https://example.com/dist/js/script.min.js.map (or ~/dist/js/script.min.js.map).

Finally, if your file is similar to:

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//-- end script.min.js
// sourceMappingURL=../maps/script.min.js.map

then your uploaded artifact should be named https://example.com/dist/maps/script.min.js.map (or ~/dist/maps/script.min.js.map).

Sentry expects that source code and source maps in a given release are uploaded to Sentry before errors occur in that release.

If you upload artifacts after an error is captured by Sentry, Sentry will not go back and retroactively apply any source annotations to those errors. Only new errors triggered after the artifact was uploaded will be affected.

We maintain an online validation tool that can be used to test your source maps against your hosted source: sourcemaps.io.

Alternatively, if you are using Sentry CLI to upload source maps to Sentry, you can use the --validate command line option to verify your source maps are correct.

When running JavaScript build tools (like webpack, Vite, ...) in development-mode/watch-mode, the generated code is sometimes incompatible with our source map uploading processes.

We recommend, especially when testing locally, to run a production build to verify your source maps uploading setup.

If you find that Sentry is not mapping filename, line, or column mappings correctly, you should verify that your source maps are functioning locally. To do so, you can use Node.js coupled with Mozilla's source-map library.

First, install source-map globally as an npm module:

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npm install -g source-map

Then, write a Node.js script that reads your source map file and tests a mapping. Here's an example:

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var fs = require("fs"),
  path = require("path"),
  sourceMap = require("source-map");
// Path to file that is generated by your build tool (webpack, tsc, ...)
var GENERATED_FILE = path.join(".", "app.min.js.map");
// Line and column located in your generated file (for example, the source
// of the error from your minified file)
var GENERATED_LINE_AND_COLUMN = { line: 1, column: 1000 };
var rawSourceMap = fs.readFileSync(GENERATED_FILE).toString();
new sourceMap.SourceMapConsumer(rawSourceMap).then(function (smc) {
  var pos = smc.originalPositionFor(GENERATED_LINE_AND_COLUMN);
  // You should see something like:
  // { source: 'original.js', line: 57, column: 9, name: 'myfunc' }
  console.log(pos);
});

If you have the same (incorrect) results locally as you do via Sentry, double-check your source map generation configuration.

For an individual artifact, Sentry accepts a max filesize of 40 MB.

Often users hit this limit because they are transmitting source files at an interim build stage. For example, after your bundler has combined all your source files, but before minification has taken place. If possible, send the original source files.

The Sentry API currently only works with source maps and source files that are uploaded as plain text (UTF-8 encoded). If the files are uploaded in a compressed format (for example, gzip), they will be not be interpreted correctly.

If you are using sentry-cli to upload your artifacts, starting with version 2.4.0 you can add the --decompress flag to your sourcemaps upload or files upload commands.

Sometimes build scripts and plugins produce pre-compressed minified files (for example, webpack's compression plugin). In these cases, you'll need to disable such plugins and perform the compression after the generated source maps/source files have been uploaded to Sentry.

Sentry does source map calculation in its workers. This means the workers need access to the files uploaded through the front end. Double check that the cron workers and web workers can read/write files from the same disk.

The Sentry Node.js SDK generally works well with the source-map-support package if you don't already have source maps uploaded to Sentry.

If you are uploading source maps to Sentry or if you are using a Sentry SDK in the browser, your code cannot use the source-map-support package. source-map-support overwrites the captured stack trace in a way that prevents our source map processors from correctly parsing it.

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