Raven.js

Raven.js is a tiny standalone JavaScript client for Sentry. It can be used to report errors from a web browser. The quality of reporting will heavily depend on the environment the data is submitted from.

Note: If you’re using Node on the server, you’ll need raven-node.

Installation

Raven.js is distributed in a few different methods, and should get included after any other libraries are included, but before your own scripts. For all details see Installation.

<script src="https://cdn.ravenjs.com/3.4.0/raven.min.js"></script>

Configuring the Client

Now you need to set up Raven.js to use your Sentry DSN:

Raven.config('___PUBLIC_DSN___').install()

At this point, Raven is ready to capture any uncaught exception.

Once you have Raven up and running, it is highly recommended to check out Configuration and Usage to improve your results.

Reporting Errors

By default, Raven makes a best effort to capture any uncaught exception.

To report errors manually, wrap potentially problematic code with a try...catch block and call Raven.captureException:

try {
    doSomething(a[0])
} catch(e) {
    Raven.captureException(e)
}

There are more ways to report errors. For a complete guide on this see Reporting Errors Correctly.

Adding Context

While a user is logged in, you can tell Sentry to associate errors with user data. This data is then submitted with each error which allows you to figure out which users are affected.

Raven.setUserContext({
    email: 'matt@example.com',
    id: '123'
})

If at any point, the user becomes unauthenticated, you can call Raven.setUserContext() with no arguments to remove their data.

Other similar methods are Raven.setExtraContext and Raven.setTagsContext as well as Raven.context. See Passing Additional Data for more info.

Dealing with Minified Source Code

Raven and Sentry support Source Maps. If you provide source maps in addition to your minified files that data becomes available in Sentry. For more information see Source Maps.

Browser Compatibility

Raven.js supports all major browsers. In older browsers, error reports collected by Raven.js may have a degraded level of detail – for example, missing stack trace data or missing source code column numbers.

The table below describes what features are available in each supported browser:

Browser Line numbers Column numbers Stack trace
Chrome ✓ ✓ ✓
Firefox ✓ ✓ ✓
Edge ✓ ✓ ✓
IE 11 ✓ ✓ ✓
IE 10 ✓ ✓ ✓
IE 9 ✓ ✓  
IE 8 ✓    
Safari 6+ ✓ ✓ ✓
iOS Safari 6+ ✓ ✓ ✓
Opera 15+ ✓ ✓ ✓
Android Browser 4.4 ✓ ✓ ✓
Android Browser 4 - 4.3 ✓    

For unlisted browsers (e.g. IE7), Raven.js is designed to fail gracefully. Including it on your page should have no effect on your page; it will just not collect and report uncaught exceptions.

Deep Dive

For more detailed information about how to get most out of Raven.js there is additional documentation available that covers all the rest:

Development info:

Resources: