Stack traces

⚠️ Error tracking is currently in beta. You can enable it from within the feature preview tab in your PostHog account. If you have any feedback during the beta, please share it with us.

Error tracking provides you with the ability to view the stack trace and code context associated with an exception. This can help understand, identify and resolve the root cause of an issue.

For languages like Python, the stack trace and code context can be gathered by the PostHog client and requires no additional processing.

Symbol sets

Compiled or minified languages requires additional information to perform a process called symbolification to produce the same stack trace and code context output shown above. The additional information is known as a symbol set.

The source of a frame in the exception stack trace should point to the minified code of your application which should contain the sourceMappingUrl parameter denoting the location of the source map. These files must either be publicly accessible for PostHog to fetch or uploaded manually to symbolify the stack trace.

You can see the symbol sets fetched by PostHog and the associated frames within the error tracking settings. Any missing symbol sets will also be present along with the failure reason. From here, you can also manually upload missing symbol sets or replace existing ones.

Uploading source maps

If your source maps are not publicly hosted, you will need to upload them during your build process to see unminified code in your stack traces.

The posthog-cli handles this process. You will need to install it and upgrade to the latest version:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/releases/download/posthog-cli-v0.0.4/posthog-cli-installer.sh | sh
posthog-cli-update

Authenticating the CLI

To authenticate the CLI you can call the login command and follow the instructions:

posthog-cli login

If you are using the CLI in a CI/CD environment such as GitHub Actions you can set environment variables to authenticate. POSTHOG_CLI_ENV_ID and POSTHOG_CLI_TOKEN should be the number in your PostHog homepage URL and a personal API key respectively.

Uploading source maps

Once you've built your application and have bundled assets that serve your site, inject the context required by PostHog to associate the maps with the served code. You will then need to upload the modified assets to PostHog.

Both of these operations can be done by running the respective sourcemap commands:

posthog-cli sourcemap inject --directory ./path/to/assets
posthog-cli sourcemap upload --directory ./path/to/assets