GitLab Discovery not working

[outer sable]

👋 Hi everyone,

I’m trying to use Backstage to automatically discover templates in a specific repository, but I’m running into an issue: the files exist, but Backstage doesn’t pick them up.

The repository structure looks like this:

ec2/ec2-template.yaml
s3/s3-template.yaml
sqs/sqs-template.yaml

If I manually register the template (Register existing component), it works fine.
However, when relying on the GitLab provider configuration, the templates don’t show up in the catalog.

Here’s my current configuration:

catalog:
  rules:
    - allow:
        - Component
        - System
        - API
        - Resource
        - Location
        - Group
        - User
        - Domain
        - Template
  providers:
    gitlab:
      bigdatacorp-templates:
        host: gitlab.com
        branch: main
        fallbackBranch: master
        includeArchivedRepos: false
        group: group/subgroup/subsubgroup
        entityFilename: '**/*-template.yaml'
        projectPattern: '^backstage-templates$'
        schedule:
          frequency: { minutes: 30 }
          timeout: { minutes: 3 }
        rules:
          - allow:
              - Template

Has anyone run into this before or knows what I might be misconfiguring?
The provider points to the correct repository, but the templates just don’t appear in the catalog.

[finite fox]

I think you need a catalog-info.yaml file with one or more Location entities pointing to the files. Otherwise Backstage has no idea that you want it to load those as templates.

For example:
https://github.com/backstage/backstage/blob/master/packages/catalog-model/examples/all-apis.yaml
This is loaded explicitly from https://github.com/backstage/demo/blob/master/app-config.yaml#L80-L82
But it works just as well with auto-discovery if you have that location entity in a catalog-info.yaml somewhere.