Inter-Process Communication

To provide the most detailed context for all events, including native crashes, the SDK merges context, scope, and breadcrumbs from all processes into the Electron main process.

By default, the SDK attempts to establish communication from renderer to main using Electron's IPC APIs. If that fails, it falls back to a custom HTTP protocol. You can change this behavior using the ipcMode option:

const { init, IPCMode } = require("@sentry/electron/main");

init({
  dsn: "___PUBLIC_DSN___",
  debug: true,
  ipcMode: IPCMode.Protocol, // Options: IPCMode.Classic, IPCMode.Protocol, or IPCMode.Both
});

Custom IPC Namespace

If your application uses multiple IPC channels, you can specify a custom namespace to prevent conflicts with Sentry's IPC channels.

Configure the same namespace across all three contexts:

Main process

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/electron/main";

Sentry.init({
  dsn: "___PUBLIC_DSN___",
  ipcNamespace: "some-app",
});

Renderer process

import * as Sentry from "@sentry/electron/renderer";

Sentry.init({
  ipcNamespace: "some-app",
});

Preload process

import { hookupIpc } from "@sentry/electron/preload-namespaced";

hookupIpc("some-app");

The SDK will prefix all IPC channels with your specified namespace (for example, some-app), helping to avoid conflicts with other channels in your application.

For more configuration options, see the configuration options documentation.

Preload Injection

The SDK automatically injects a preload script using session.setPreloads(preloads). By default, this only applies to the defaultSession.

If your app uses other sessions, pass them via the getSessions option in the main process:

import { session } from "electron";
import * as Sentry from "@sentry/electron/main";

Sentry.init({
  dsn: "___PUBLIC_DSN___",
  getSessions: () => [
    session.defaultSession,
    session.fromPartition("persist:my-session"),
  ],
});

Manual Preload

If you prefer to bundle and configure the preload script manually, import the SDK preload code into your own preload script:

import "@sentry/electron/preload";

This exposes IPC to the isolated renderer via Electron's contextBridge API.

Check out our example apps for implementation details.