Building Plugin Dependencies

The Sentry Unreal plugin ships with pre-built binaries for all supported platforms. In most cases, you don't need to build anything yourself. However, building dependencies locally may be needed when:

• Testing or debugging unreleased changes to the underlying platform SDKs
• Applying custom patches to the platform SDKs for your project's specific needs

Prerequisites

• GitHub CLI
• PowerShell 7+ (or Windows PowerShell 5.1)
• Git
• CMake 3.16+
• Platform toolchain: Visual Studio 2019+ on Windows, Clang 13+ on Linux, Xcode on macOS
• Android builds: Java 17, Android SDK (API 33), Android NDK r25b
• Crash Reporter builds: .NET 9.0 SDK

Overview

The plugin depends on platform-specific SDKs and other tools that are pre-built in CI and bundled into the Source/ThirdParty/ directory:

• sentry-native — Windows and Linux
• sentry-cocoa — macOS and iOS
• sentry-java — Android
• sentry-desktop-crash-reporter — External crash reporter application for desktop platforms

The sentry-unreal repository includes a build-deps.ps1 script that automates building these SDKs and copying the resulting binaries to the correct locations within the plugin. The plugin-dev/ directory then serves as the complete plugin package that can be copied into any Unreal project.

Setup

Clone the sentry-unreal repository, check out the tag that matches your installed plugin version, and run the initialization script:

git clone https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-unreal.git
cd sentry-unreal
git checkout 1.XX.0  # match your installed plugin version

You also need a local clone of the SDK you want to build (see links in Overview). Each SDK version is pinned as a Git submodule under modules/ in the sentry-unreal repository — check out the same commit or tag in your local clone. You can find the expected version by looking at the submodule reference for your plugin's release tag on GitHub.

Using the Build Script

Use scripts/build-deps.ps1 to rebuild specific SDKs:

# Point the script to your local SDK clone via environment variable or parameter
$env:SENTRY_NATIVE_PATH = "D:\projects\sentry-native"

# Build sentry-native (both Crashpad and Native backends)
./scripts/build-deps.ps1 -Native

# Or pass the path directly
./scripts/build-deps.ps1 -Native -NativePath "D:\projects\sentry-native"

The script builds the SDK and copies the output binaries into plugin-dev/Source/ThirdParty/, replacing the pre-built ones. After that, copy the contents of plugin-dev/ to your project's Plugins/sentry-unreal/ directory — this replaces the plugin with your custom-built version.

Available flags:

Each flag has a corresponding path parameter (e.g., -NativePath, -CocoaPath) that overrides the environment variable.

The script uses a fixed set of build settings that match the plugin's CI builds. If you need to customize the build (for example, passing additional CMake flags to sentry-native), you can modify the corresponding build function in scripts/build-deps.ps1 before running it.