Using Spotlight with Django

This guide gets Spotlight up and running in Django with Sentry SDK.

1. Installation

Install Sentry SDK

Follow the Django Getting Started guide to install and configure Sentry SDK for Python/Django.

Note that you don’t need a DSN or don’t need to sign up for Sentry to use Spotlight. If you already have Sentry SDK installed, make sure you have v2.25.0 or newer.

Get and Run Spotlight

npx

npx @spotlightjs/spotlight

docker

docker run --rm -p 8969 ghcr.io/getsentry/spotlight:latest

binary

curl -q https://spotlightjs.com/install.sh | sh

2. Enable Spotlight

Set SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT environment variable to 1¹ (see our docker compose instructions if you are using Docker Compose).

That’s it! As long as Spotlight is running, and DEBUG is set to True in your Django settings², our Django integration will automatically inject it into your UI.

Additional Configuration

If for some reason you do not want Spotlight to inject itself onto the pages, you can set SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT_MIDDLEWARE environment variable to 0. If you are okay with the injection but want the default Django error page instead of Spotlight, you can set SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT_ON_ERROR environment variable to 0 to only disable this part.

Footnotes

1. If, for some reason, you need to run Spotlight on a different port or domain, you can set it here instead of a “truthy” value which would use the default URL (ie. SENTRY_SPOTLIGHT=http://localhost:3839/stream). ↩

2. This requirement is to prevent enabling Spotlight accidentally on production environments. ↩