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AWS S3 Discovery

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This documentation is written for the new backend system which is the default since Backstage version 1.24. If you are still on the old backend system, you may want to read its own article instead, and consider migrating!

The AWS S3 integration has a special entity provider for discovering catalog entities located in an S3 Bucket. If you have a bucket that contains multiple catalog files, and you want to automatically discover them, you can use this provider. The provider will crawl your S3 bucket and register entities matching the configured path. This can be useful as an alternative to static locations or manually adding things to the catalog.

To use the entity provider, you'll need an AWS S3 integration set up with accessKeyId and secretAccessKey, and/or a roleArn or none of these (e.g., profile- or instance-based credentials).

At production deployments, you likely manage these with the permissions attached to your instance.

In your configuration, you add a provider config per bucket:

# app-config.yaml

catalog:
  providers:
    awsS3:
      yourProviderId: # identifies your dataset / provider independent of config changes
        bucketName: sample-bucket
        prefix: prefix/ # optional
        region: us-east-2 # optional, uses the default region otherwise
        schedule: # same options as in SchedulerServiceTaskScheduleDefinition
          # supports cron, ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
          frequency: { minutes: 30 }
          # supports ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
          timeout: { minutes: 3 }

For simple setups, you can omit the provider ID at the config which has the same effect as using default for it.

# app-config.yaml

catalog:
  providers:
    awsS3:
      # uses "default" as provider ID
      bucketName: sample-bucket
      prefix: prefix/ # optional
      region: us-east-2 # optional, uses the default region otherwise
      schedule: # same options as in SchedulerServiceTaskScheduleDefinition
        # supports cron, ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
        frequency: { minutes: 30 }
        # supports ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
        timeout: { minutes: 3 }

As this provider is not one of the default providers, you will first need to install the AWS catalog plugin:

From your Backstage root directory
yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-aws

Then update your backend by adding the following line:

packages/backend/src/index.ts
backend.add(import('@backstage/plugin-catalog-backend'));
backend.add(import('@backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-aws'));