GlitchTip on arm64

Why does everything have to be so hard on arm64? Well, maybe not directly hard, but a lot more work. And the reason is simple, we live almost in a amd64 monoculture. Mobile phones are changing that, as is Apple M1, but also arm64 servers.

Update: GlitchTip now publishes arm64 images on docker hub.

I’ve long been using Sentry. Automated bug reporting and collecting is a very useful tool for developers. But Sentry turned its back on open source and I haven’t upgraded my instance since. There are a lot of alternatives, but few of them are open source.

Enter GlitchTip, a Django-based project that implements the Sentry API, so that the Sentry client libraries just work. Not directly a fork, more of a rewrite, but a nice project in any case. I decided to try running it using Docker on an arm64 server.

GlitchTip seemed pretty easy to build from the Dockerfiles. I just cloned the backend repository and ran docker build -t glitchtip-backend . and everything seemed to go smoothly. But when I tried to run the service I got the error:

django.db.utils.OperationalError: SCRAM authentication requires libpq version 10 or above

As you can read from the bug report, the problem is psycopg2-binary on arm64. After some discussion and help from the GlitchTip project members, the solution turns out to be to build the docker image with psycopg2 instead of psycopg2-binary. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that the way to do that was: docker build -t glitchtip-backend --build-arg IS_CI=True ..

Then the frontend files had to be included in the image. I modified the frontend dockerfile a bit:

FROM glitchtip-backend:latest
ARG GLITCHTIP_VERSION=local
ENV GLITCHTIP_VERSION ${GLITCHTIP_VERSION}

COPY dist/glitchtip-frontend /code/dist

RUN SECRET_KEY=ci ./manage.py collectstatic --noinput

And built it using docker build -t glitchtip . in the frontend repository.

Running the images is quite easy using NixOS, and the needed environment variables are mostly well documented:

virtualisation.oci-containers.containers.glitchtip-web = {
  image = "glitchtip:latest";
  autoStart = true;
  environment = {
    GLITCHTIP_DOMAIN = "https://${config.networking.hostName}";
    SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = "true";
    DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = "noreply@${config.networking.hostName}";
    EMAIL_URL = "smtp://172.18.0.1:25";
    GLITCHTIP_MAX_EVENT_LIFE_DAYS = "366"; # default 90
    REDIS_URL = "redis://redis:6379/1";
    ENABLE_OPEN_USER_REGISTRATION = "false";
    PORT = "8000"; # reverse proxy this
    SECRET_KEY = "..."; # strong random
    DATABASE_URL = "postgres://user:pass@host:port/dbnam?options";
  };
};
virtualisation.oci-containers.containers.glitchtip-worker = {
  image = "glitchtip:latest";
  autoStart = true;
  cmd = [ "./bin/run-celery-with-beat.sh" ];
  environment = { ... };
};

Still had to remember to run the database migrations and it was ready to be configured via the web interface.