Install watching

Most of the time you should finish onboarding and let focale open the watching pull request. Merge it if it is still open, set your ingest DSN as a host secret, then publish. The PR adds a boot file (focale.instrument.mjs) and wraps the handlers you confirmed with watch(). The example env file uses a placeholder, not the live key.

Never commit the live ingest key. Put FOCALE_DSN in .env locally, or in your host’s secret store (Lovable, Bolt, Vercel, Railway, and the like). The key is not a GitHub token.

DSN

FOCALE_DSN=https://<key>@intake.focale.io

focale gives you this value. Copy it into secrets. See DSN for the shape.

Manual install

Use this if the PR did not land, or you want to add watching yourself.

Node
Browser
Deno
Edge

Node is the runtime focale lands today.

npm install @focale/sdk @focale/sdk-node

Call start() once when the process boots, then wrap the handler you care about:

import { start } from '@focale/sdk-node';
import { watch } from '@focale/sdk';

await start(); // reads FOCALE_DSN

export const POST = watch('auth.signup', async (req) => {
  // existing handler
});

The file focale would have added looks like this:

import { start } from '@focale/sdk-node';
await start();

Browser start() exists so a page can share the same DSN. Automatic browser watching is not in scope yet.

npm install @focale/sdk @focale/sdk-browser

import { start } from '@focale/sdk-browser';
import { watch } from '@focale/sdk';

start(); // reads FOCALE_DSN

Deno start() is a stub around the same core.

import { start } from '@focale/sdk-deno';
import { watch } from '@focale/sdk';

start();

Edge start() is a stub around the same core.

import { start } from '@focale/sdk-edge';
import { watch } from '@focale/sdk';

start();

If you already send OpenTelemetry yourself, you can skip the SDK. See OTLP.

Get started

Your app

Reference

Install watching

DSN

Manual install

​DSN

​Manual install

DSN

Manual install