Sentry Wizard problematic for offline setup

[dcramer]

The wizard expects to fully setup your DSN/account, but Spotlight encourages you to utilize the Sentry SDKs before or without using Sentry in production. This would be fine, except the wizard is now the recommended way to setup Sentry in certain runtimes, such as Next.js

[smeubank]

is the goal for such frameworks, that spotlight could be added with the wizard? And the DSN/account is not needed at least locally

[dcramer]

No - more that we need the Sentry setup to work first, then we add Spotlight from there. You simply dont need the DSN for Spotlight so forcing that is painful for folks wanting to adopt. Its not bad for some stuff, but particularly bad for something ilke Next.js

[Shubhdeep12]

So, @dcramer, are you suggesting making the step of connecting the account to get the DSN in the wizard optional? And later, an optional step to add Spotlight as well?

[dcramer]

Yeah you don't need the DSN at all. Its just "how to go to prooduction" => add your DSN and maybe some other things.

This is mostly probleamtic for things where we've prioritzed the wizard for developers, vs the simple manual setup. Next.js is a great example here.

Likely requires the SDK team at Sentry to make changes to get this back on track.

[Shubhdeep12]

Is there an ongoing active discussion or thread related to this? I'm interested in participating.
I'll also explore the wizard repository for any relevant information.

[Lms24]

Hmm I'm a bit on the fence if the spotlight use case justifies asking all wizard users a question like

"Do you want to set up Sentry for production or (just) for development?"

I think maybe we add a CLI arg to bypass authentication and project selection (which we need to get the DSN and other things) for starters.

Btw, not saying that this can never happen but right now Spotlight is basically the only way how folks could make use of Sentry without a DSN.
Maybe we should prioritize a spotlight wizard instead 🤔

[Shubhdeep12]

Yes, it would be more logical to have a wizard for Spotlight.
The use case for Spotlight is defined in such a way that Sentry is an integration for it, but not all users may have Sentry.
Even though Sentry is the default integration, most users will be utilizing Spotlight to view traces through the Sentry SDK, but it can be removed from Spotlight depending on different use cases.

[dcramer]

Hmm I'm a bit on the fence if the spotlight use case justifies asking all wizard users a question like

"Do you want to set up Sentry for production or (just) for development?"

I think maybe we add a CLI arg to bypass authentication and project selection (which we need to get the DSN and other things) for starters.

Btw, not saying that this can never happen but right now Spotlight is basically the only way how folks could make use of Sentry without a DSN. Maybe we should prioritize a spotlight wizard instead 🤔

To me the issue is not that the wizard is a problem, its that we've now prioritized showing the wizard vs showing you how to actually set things up.

Additionally, given Sentry needs you to understand how to disable itself in local dev (e.g. unset the DSN), I still think theres an opp to improve things here and keep that the truth. At that point there's no reason we couldnt literally inject // spotlight: true, // uncomment this to enable Spotlight (https://spotlightjs.com)