Crashpad

Crashpad is an open-source multiplatform crash reporting system written in C++ by Google. It supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, and features an uploader to submit Minidumps to a configured URL right when the process crashes.

To use the Crashpad backend with the Native SDK, configure the CMake build with the SENTRY_BACKEND=crashpad option. This will automatically create a crashpad_handler executable alongside the sentry library.

cmake -B build -D SENTRY_BACKEND=crashpad

The SDK will automatically look for a crashpad_handler executable in the same directory as the running application. It will also use the .sentry-native directory as its database by default, relative to the current working directory of your application. This location temporarily hosts Minidumps before they are uploaded to Sentry.

Both of these paths can be customized like this:

sentry_options_t *options = sentry_options_new();
sentry_options_set_handler_path(options, "path/to/crashpad_handler");
sentry_options_set_database_path(options, "sentry-db-directory");
sentry_init(options);

The crashpad handler executable must be shipped alongside your application so that it can be launched when initializing the SDK. The path is evaluated according to shell lookup rules at runtime.

It is advised to specify both the path to the crashpad_handler executable as well as the path to the database directory manually.

You can also use Crashpad for multi-process use cases. To do this, initialize Sentry individually in each process, so that every process spawns its own Crashpad handler, either in a separate database path or using a shared database path. Each run will use its individual run directory, and there is filesystem-level locking in place.

Known Limitations

When using the Crashpad backend on macOS, the status of crashed sessions can not be reliably determined, and may be classified as abnormal exits instead.

If you want to deploy your application to the macOS App Store or distribute it "sandboxed" outside, the crashpad client will fail to start the crashpad_handler executable (due to sandbox restrictions). For these deployment targets, we recommend using the breakpad backend.