Sentry

The Sentry is an investigative and policy team that follows the dirty money connected to African war criminals and transnational war profiteers and seeks to shut those benefiting from violence out of the international financial system. By disrupting the cost-benefit calculations of those who hijack governments for self-enrichment, we seek to counter the main drivers of conflict and create new leverage for peace, human rights, and good governance. The Sentry is composed of financial investigators, international human rights lawyers, and regional experts, as well as former law enforcement agents, intelligence officers, policymakers, investigative journalists, and banking professionals. Co-founded by George Clooney and John Prendergast, The Sentry is a strategic partner of the Clooney Foundation for Justice.

In addition to making its source code available publicly, Sentry offers and maintains a minimal setup that works out-of-the-box for simple use cases. This repository also serves as a blueprint for how various Sentry services connect for a complete setup, which is useful for folks willing to maintain larger installations. For the sake of simplicity, we have chosen to use Docker and Docker Compose for this, along with a bash-based install and upgrade script.

Getting Started

Our recommendation is to download the latest release of the self-hosted repository, and then run ./install.sh inside this directory. This script will take care of all the things you need to get started, including a base-line configuration, and then will tell you to run docker-compose up -d to start Sentry. Sentry binds to port 9000 by default. You should be able to reach the login page at http://127.0.0.1:9000.

You very likely will want to adjust the default configuration for Sentry. These facilities are available for that purpose:

1. sentry/config.yml—Contains most, if not all, configuration options to adjust. This file is generated from sentry/config.example.yml at the time of installation. The file itself documents the most common configuration options as code comments. Some popular settings in this file include:
   1. system.url-prefix (we prompt you to set this at the welcome screen, right after the installation)
   2. mail.* (though we do ship with a basic SMTP server)
   3. integrations for GitHub, Slack, etc.
2. sentry/sentry.conf.py—Contains more advanced configuration. This file is generated from sentry/sentry.conf.example.py during installation.
3. Environment variables—The available keys are defined in .env. Use some system-dependent means of setting environment variables if you need to override any of them. To avoid Git changes, simply create a file called .env.custom and insert your system-dependent environment variables there. In order to use this, please use docker-compose --env-file /path/to/.env.custom up -d.
4. Geolocation uses a custom configuration file to conform to the underlying technology.

You can find more about configuring Sentry at the configuration section of our developer documentation.

We strongly recommend using a dedicated load balancer in front of your Sentry setup bound to a dedicated domain or subdomain. A dedicated load balancer that does SSL/TLS termination that also forwards the client IP address as Docker Compose internal network (as this is close to impossible to get otherwise) would give you the best Sentry experience. As part of this setup we recommend configuring a load balancer health check against the /_health/ endpoint using HTTP protocol. This will return a 200 if Sentry is up or a 500 with the list of problems.

Once you have setup a load balancer or reverse proxy to your Sentry instance, you should modify the system.url-prefix in the config.yml file to match your new URL and protocol. You should also update the SSL/TLS section in the sentry/sentry.conf.py script, otherwise you may get CSRF-related errors when performing certain actions such as configuring integrations.

Keep in mind that all this setup uses single-nodes for all services, including Kafka. For larger loads, you’d need a beefy machine with lots of RAM and disk storage. To scale up even further, you are very likely to use clusters with a more complex tool, such as Kubernetes. Due to self-hosted installations’ very custom nature, we do not offer any recommendations or guidance around scaling up. We do what works for us for our thousands of customers over at sentry.io and would love to have you over when you feel your local install’s maintenance becomes a burden instead of a joy.