Roadie Backstage Entity Validator

Published on June 29th, 2022

Introduction

Roadie provides many additional utilities to make your experience with Backstage smoother. One of these is the Backstage Entity Validator. With this validator you can confirm that the entity descriptor files you are creating for Backstage conform to the needed format and prerequisites so that they work properly with Backstage and Roadie.

The Entity Validator is enabled automatically when you install the Roadie GitHub app to your GitHub organization. The validator automatically checks your pull requests and validates Backstage files included in them. The GitHub app check files with .yml or .yaml type and that have an apiVersion containing a string backstage.io, thus indicating that it is a Backstage descriptor file.

Configuration

The validator has a configuration file option to optionally exclude Backstage descriptor files from validation. The validator included in Roadie GitHub app reads a file called .roadierc from the repository root and determines configuration based on that. The format of the .roadierc file is yaml.

If you want to exclude files from validation you can use a glob pattern of file definitions to exclude. An example configuration would look like something like below:

validator:
  exclude:
    - 'catalog-*.yaml'

Further reading

  1. The Backstage Entity Validator repository.