What are Artifact Bundles
Learn about artifact bundles.
This article explains the inner workings of Artifact Bundles, and the implications of using them. Visit Uploading Source Maps if you're looking for our guides on how to upload source maps.
Sentry uses Artifact Bundles for managing un-minification of your stack traces. A bundle, at a higher level, contains all the minified sources and source maps (known as artifacts) required for Sentry to unminify the frames of a stack trace.
An artifact bundle is our new bundle format that aims to address the shortcomings of the old Release Bundles by adding the support for Debug IDs and removing the need to create a release.
Artifact Bundles solve the challenge of matching paths by using a new identification mechanism known as Debug IDs. Rather than relying on paths we uniquely identify and bind pairs of minified sources and source maps with a Debug ID (UUID). With this, we are able to quickly identify the minified source and corresponding source map without ever needing to check any paths. Thus, you don't have to worry about wrong paths configurations.
When using sentry-cli or the Webpack, Vite, or Rollup bundler plugins, Debug IDs are generated deterministically based on the source file contents. Deterministic Debug IDs for esbuild are currently not supported.
If you want to learn more about the rationale behind Debug IDs, we suggest taking a look at our engineering blog.
Since you might still want to know to which release a specific artifact bundle is connected to, we designed a new way to still associate a release to your bundle.
The new Artifact Bundle format supports a new kind of association to a release and optionally dist, known as weak release association. This type of association will not require the creation of a release before uploading sourcemaps and will consequently allow the creation of a release as a separate step down the pipeline.
With an associated release and optionally dist you will be able to quickly go to the Artifact Bundle from your release in Sentry, without having to worry about which artifact bundle was used for your errors.
Artifact Bundles have a retention period of 90 days, using a time to idle expiration mechanism. This means that uploaded artifact bundles are retained for as long as they are actively being used for event processing. Once an artifact bundle has not been used to process incoming events for at least 90 days, it will automatically expire and be eligible for deletion.
Our documentation is open source and available on GitHub. Your contributions are welcome, whether fixing a typo (drat!) or suggesting an update ("yeah, this would be better").