Start app during init to verify instrumentation

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start at the sentry init command and compare its flow with the existing agent-plugin behavior described in the issue. Define a safe way to decide when a local run is feasible, how to ask or bail out for expensive projects, and how completion proves that a test error was sent; use related issue #1381 for the success-output context.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

After sentry init instruments a project, nothing reaches Sentry unless the app is actually running and exercised. Users are left to know they should start the app and try things out; the CLI does not detect a local runtime or drive a verification path.

Agent plugins already do a stronger version of this: figure out how to start the app (or ask the user), execute test code, and send a test error so setup is proven end-to-end.

Current behavior

  • sentry init configures the SDK and finishes without checking whether the app is running locally
  • no start/run step and no automatic test error from a live app process
  • success can look complete while zero events were sent

Gap

  • Local instrumentation only produces signal when the app runs; without that, users get a false sense that setup is done
  • Naive always-run behavior is risky on large/hard projects (e.g. monorepos like sentry), where agent-driven start attempts can burn excessive tokens

Related: #1381 (init success output does not prove setup worked)

Proposal from discussion

  • Try to start/run the project after init, similar to the plugin flow, and send a test error when feasible
  • Bail out early (or ask the user) when the project looks difficult/expensive to run rather than forcing a full start attempt

Raised by Dhrumil Parekh; constrained by Miguel Betegon from prior run attempts on large repos.

Requested by Miguel Betegon.

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Dominant language
TypeScript
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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