Backtrace: Free for Electron Maintainers

Two of our most recent blog-post focused on the following topics:

It seems only fitting that we combine these two posts and give free access to Backtrace for members of the Electron maintainer community. Read on to find out how to submit your crashes to the Electron Backtrace instance.

We’ve had a chance to meet some of the community in-person and even more online as more and more Electron projects start using Backtrace. We’re big fans of what the community has been able to accomplish and even more excited to see more applications built on top of Electron. We hope that Backtrace can help Electron maintainers gain visibility into Electron crashes and give them the data they need to prioritize and resolve their top crashers.

If you’re part of the Electron maintainer community, you will receive an invite to https://electron.sp.backtrace.io. Please feel free to reach out to me (abel on the Electron HQ channel) if you haven’t received one yet.

Post Crashes Directly from crashReporter

If you’re an Electron user and want to use Backtrace to post your crash to Electron Maintainers, you can simply point your Electron application using crashReporter via following submitURL:

https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=12c3a29e4b85c3eb140889875b7623bbd12bd332264efbace51a5e7a6f2b0ad2

1	https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=12c3a29e4b85c3eb140889875b7623bbd12bd332264efbace51a5e7a6f2b0ad2

For reference, here is the javascript snippet you should add to your main and render process code:

const {crashReporter} = require('electron')

crashReporter.start({
  productName: 'YourName',
  companyName: 'YourCompany',
  submitURL: 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=12c3a29e4b85c3eb140889875b7623bbd12bd332264efbace51a5e7a6f2b0ad2',
  uploadToServer: true
})

const {crashReporter} = require('electron')

crashReporter.start({

productName: 'YourName',

companyName: 'YourCompany',

submitURL: 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=12c3a29e4b85c3eb140889875b7623bbd12bd332264efbace51a5e7a6f2b0ad2',

uploadToServer: true

})

Upload Crashes Manually

Already have a minidump laying around? You can submit existing dumps via our HTTP API. For example, using curl you would:

curl --data-binary @<dump_file.dmp> 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64'

1	curl --data-binary @<dump_file.dmp> 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64'

You can add additional context, such as your extra parameters, via query-string parameters when you are manually submitting. For example, if I wanted to indicate that ver was 1.8.1, I would add &ver=1.8.1 to the URL as shown below.

curl --data-binary @<dump_file.dmp> 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64&ver=1.8.1'

1	curl --data-binary @<dump_file.dmp> 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64&ver=1.8.1'

You’ll receive a JSON response with the object id . If you have access to electron.sp.backtrace.io, you can directly navigate to the minidump by going to: https://electron.sp.backtrace.io/dashboard/electron/project/Electron/debugger/7

$ curl --data-binary @electron_sample.dmp 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64&ver=1.8.1'
$ {"response":"ok","object":"7"}

1 2	$ curl --data-binary @electron_sample.dmp 'https://electron.sp.backtrace.io:6098/post?format=minidump&token=de85f61dfdb792832d2748f02ec4523c3fd240baf2d16f106851507dca288a64&ver=1.8.1' $ {"response":"ok","object":"7"}

We’re excited for the Electron maintainers and larger Electron community to use Backtrace. Have questions or comments? Reach out to us at info@backtrace.io.