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May 6, 2026 by Luc Perkins

Sentry crash reports for Determinate Nix

As of version 3.18.0, Determinate Nix now uploads crash reports to Sentry, the industry-leading application monitoring platform that we at Determinate Systems also use for FlakeHub. We’re committed to relentlessly improving Determinate Nix, and proactive crash reporting is the next logical step in our efforts will enable us to more easily triage and remedy crashes that occur in the wild, without depending on manual use reports.

These crash reports contain this information (when applicable):

  • The Determinate Nix version
  • The Nix command that was run
  • Crashpad information for crashes like segfaults and aborts
  • Stack traces
  • Standard context clues, like the operating system name and version, system architecture, and hostname

Crash reports do not contain things like these:

  • Usernames
  • IP addresses
  • Performance traces
  • Nix expressions
  • Source code
  • File paths
More info in our docs

For more info about our Sentry integration, including how to opt out of crash reporting, see the dedicated telemetry guide in our documentation.

We’ve tried out these crash reports with a few Determinate Systems customers and they’ve already enabled us to squash several smaller bugs that otherwise may have gone undetected. We’re now ready to roll this out to all Determinate Nix users and fully confident that this new information-gathering process will yield clear benefits over time.

How to get Determinate Nix

If you already have Determinate Nix installed, you can upgrade to the latest version with one Determinate Nixd command:

Upgrade command for Determinate Nix
sudo determinate-nixd upgrade

If you don’t yet have Determinate Nix installed, you can upgrade or migrate to Determinate Nix on macOS using our graphical installer:

Logo for graphical installer

Install Determinate Nix on macOS now 🍎

With support for Apple Silicon (aarch64-darwin)

On Linux:

Install Determinate Nix on Linux
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L https://install.determinate.systems/nix | \
sh -s -- install --determinate

On NixOS, we recommend using our dedicated NixOS module or our NixOS ISO (NixOS installer for x86_64, NixOS installer for ARM) with Determinate Nix pre-installed.

On GitHub Actions:

.github/workflows/nix-ci.yaml
on:
pull_request:
workflow_dispatch:
push:
branches:
- main
jobs:
nix-ci:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
# Include this block to log in to FlakeHub and access private flakes
permissions:
id-token: write
contents: read
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v5
- uses: DeterminateSystems/flake-checker-action@main
- uses: DeterminateSystems/determinate-nix-action@v3
- uses: DeterminateSystems/flakehub-cache-action@main
- run: nix flake check

In Amazon Web Services:

aws.tf
data "aws_ami" "detsys_nixos" {
most_recent = true
owners = ["535002876703"]
filter {
name = "name"
values = ["determinate/nixos/epoch-1/*"]
}
filter {
name = "architecture"
values = ["x86_64"]
}
}

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Written by Luc Perkins

Luc is a technical writer, software engineer, and Nix advocate who's always on the lookout for qualitatively better ways of building software. He originally hails from the Pacific Northwest but has recently taken to living abroad.