Edit

GitLab Discovery

The GitLab integration has a special discovery processor for discovering catalog entities from GitLab. The processor will crawl the GitLab instance 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 discovery processor, you'll need a GitLab integration set up with a token. Then you can add a location target to the catalog configuration:

catalog:
  locations:
    - type: gitlab-discovery
      target: https://gitlab.com/group/subgroup/blob/main/catalog-info.yaml

Note the gitlab-discovery type, as this is not a regular url processor.

The target is composed of three parts:

• The base URL, https://gitlab.com in this case
• The group path, group/subgroup in this case. This is optional: If you omit this path the processor will scan the entire GitLab instance instead.
• The path within each repository to find the catalog YAML file. This will usually be /blob/main/catalog-info.yaml, /blob/master/catalog-info.yaml or a similar variation for catalog files stored in the root directory of each repository. If you want to use the repository's default branch use the * wildcard, e.g.: /blob/*/catalog-info.yaml

Finally, you will have to add the processor in the catalog initialization code of your backend.

// In packages/backend/src/plugins/catalog.ts
+import { GitLabDiscoveryProcessor } from '@backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-gitlab';

 export default async function createPlugin(
   env: PluginEnvironment,
 ): Promise<Router> {
   const builder = await CatalogBuilder.create(env);
+  builder.addProcessor(
+    GitLabDiscoveryProcessor.fromConfig(env.config, { logger: env.logger })
+  );

If you don't want create location object if file with component definition do not exists in project, you can set the skipReposWithoutExactFileMatch option. That can reduce count of request to gitlab with 404 status code.