Before you can use Bugsink, you’ll need to install it. A local install is a great way to determine if Bugsink is right for you and is even easier to set up than a production environment.
Bugsink’s License allows you to run it for yourself on your local machine for free.
When running locally, you won’t be able to send crash reports from your production application to Bugsink. However, it’s still a great improvement to your development workflow, and makes it easy to evaluate Bugsink’s features.
Bugsink is written in Python, so you need to have Python installed on your
system. You can download Python from the official
website or using a package manager like
apt or brew.
You can verify that Python is installed by running the following command:
python --version
and similarly for pip:
pip3 --version
and for venv:
python3 -c "import venv; print('venv is installed')"
If any of these commands fail, you may need to install Python and its dependencies. The exact steps depend on your operating system, so please refer to the official Python documentation for more information.
Both the Bugsink code and the data it collects will be stored somewhere. We’ll use a separate directory for this purpose. Create a new directory and navigate to it:
mkdir bugsink
cd bugsink
It’s a good practice to use a virtual environment to manage your Python dependencies. This way, you can avoid conflicts between different projects.
Run the following commands to create a virtual environment and activate it:
python -m venv .
source bin/activate
After running these commands, you should see the name of the virtual environment
in parentheses at the start of your shell prompt, e.g. (bugsink).
You can install Bugsink using pip:
python -m pip install bugsink --upgrade
You should see output indicating that Bugsink and its dependencies are being installed. After the installation is complete, you can verify that Bugsink is installed by running:
bugsink-show-version
Bugsink relies on a configuration file to determine how it should run. You can create a configuration file that’s suitable for local development by running:
bugsink-create-conf --template=local --port=8000
This will create a file bugsink_conf.py in the current directory. You may
later edit this file to customize the configuration but for this tutorial the
default configuration should be sufficient.
Bugsink uses a database to store the data it collects. You can initialize the database by running:
bugsink-manage migrate
This will create a new SQLite database in the current directory and set up the necessary tables. You may verify the presence of the database by running:
ls db.sqlite3
Create a superuser to manage the Bugsink installation. Run the following command and follow the prompts.
bugsink-manage createsuperuser
This will create a new user account with administrative privileges.
We will run Bugsink using Gunicorn (a WSGI server, i.e. a server that can run Python web applications). Gunicorn was already installed as part of the Bugsink dependencies, so we just need to run it.
gunicorn --bind="127.0.0.1:8000" --access-logfile - bugsink.wsgi
You should see output indicating that the server is running. You can now access Bugsink by visiting http://localhost:8000/ in your web browser and logging in with the superuser account you created earlier.
You’ve successfully installed Bugsink on your local machine! You can now start using it to collect crash reports for your (local) applications. Log in with the superuser credentials you set up earlier and configure your first project.