Azure Blob Storage Discovery

info

This documentation is written for the new backend system which is the default since Backstage version 1.24.

The Azure Blob Storage account integration has a special entity provider for discovering catalog entities located in a storage account container. If you have a container that contains multiple catalog files, and you want to automatically discover them, you can use this provider. The provider will crawl your Blob Storage account container 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 Azure Blob Storage account integration set up with accountName and either aadCredential, sasToken, or accountKey

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:
    azureBlob:
      providerId:
        accountName: ${ACCOUNT_NAME}
        containerName: ${CONTAINER_NAME}
        schedule: # same options as in TaskScheduleDefinition
          # 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:
    azureBlob:
      accountName: ${ACCOUNT_NAME}
      containerName: ${CONTAINER_NAME}
      schedule: # same options as in TaskScheduleDefinition
        # 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 Azure catalog plugin:

From your Backstage root directory

yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-azure

Then updated 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-azure'));