Skip to main content

Gerrit Discovery

info

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 Gerrit integration has a special entity provider for discovering catalog entities from Gerrit repositories. The provider uses the "List Projects" API in Gerrit to get a list of repositories and will automatically ingest all catalog-info.yaml files stored in the root of the matching projects.

Installation​

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

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

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-gerrit'));

Configuration​

To use the discovery processor, you'll need a Gerrit integration set up. Then you can add any number of providers.

# app-config.yaml
catalog:
  providers:
    gerrit:
      yourProviderId: # identifies your dataset / provider independent of config changes
        host: gerrit-your-company.com
        branch: master # Optional, defaults to the repository's default branch
        query: 'state=ACTIVE&prefix=webapps'
        catalogPath: 'catalog-info.yaml' # Optional, defaults to catalog-info.yaml
        schedule:
          # 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 }
      backend:
        host: gerrit-your-company.com
        branch: master # Optional
        query: 'state=ACTIVE&prefix=backend'
        # catalogPath can be a glob-pattern supported by the minimatch library
        catalogPath: '{**/catalog-info.{yml,yaml},**/.catalog-info/*.{yml,yaml}}'

The provider configuration consists of the following parts:

  • host: the host of the Gerrit integration to use.
  • branch (optional): the branch where we will look for catalog entities (defaults to the repository's default branch).
  • query: this string is directly used as the argument to the "List Project" API. Typically, you will want to have some filter here to exclude projects that will never contain any catalog files.
  • catalogPath: path relative to the root of the repository where the Backstage manifests are stored. It can also be a glob pattern supported by minimatch to load multiple files.