The control-boot is a simple (and incomplete) experiment to see how to build an IDP like Backstage with a React Front-end and a Java Back-end based on Spring Boot.

The goal of the UI is to be a no-nonsense, effective and compact (Backstage has to much space in it IMHO).

The focus of control-booth is on BACKEND developers exposing services/information to other developers, so the front-end scode/setup might change moving forward if I find a better/simpler way to build a responsive UI.

We use plain Javascript and HTML for the UI components to keep the code as simple and minimize library/framework clashes.

About this project

At the moment not much is implemented, but what works:

• Authentication via Keycloak backed by OpenLDAP
• LdapCatalogEntityProvider scans LDAP and creates user and group entities.
• Simple Catalog page that list the entities in the database.
• Profile page the shows the user details (including the jpegPhoto if it exists in LDAP)
• Support for dark/light mode in the UI.
• About page.

This project is incomplete and there are areas of an IDP that I would like to explore:

• Refactor the code to use the Hexagonal Architecture pattern.
• GitLab/GIT
  • Create a catalog entity provider that scans a Gitlab instance for catalog-info.yaml, parses them and creates the appropriate entities.
• Search - Integrate Open Search or Vespa (Open source search engines)
  • Document Search Indexer - Index documentation from GIT repos.
    • Should this work like Backstage and pick up MD files and render them to a bucket or should we just pick up the MD/HTML text bodies and index them with references back to the source (Gitlab repo)?
    • Plugins for
      • Google docs
      • Confluence
      • Websites (webcrawl)
• Plugins/extensions
  • How should people use this IDP?
    • Backend? - Package this repo as a spring boot lib?
    • Frontend? - Package the reusable parts as lib?
• Golden Path (Templating)
  • Is there a better way to orchestrate and generate/maintain templates/golden-paths
    • Use proper template solution to separate the development of templates from the orchestration/workflow.
      • cookiecutter
      • copier
    • Simple approval workflows
      • Roles/groups allowed to initiate
      • Roles/groups allowed to approve
      • Backend would be just a simple REST endpoint with predefined POST JSON payload
• Resource Monitoring (Plugins)
  • K8s workload monitoring
  • Google Resources
  • AWS Resources
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
• Alerting/On-Call
  • Open source solution
    • https://github.com/dfir-iris/iris-web and https://github.com/linkedin/oncall
• Notifications
  • Email/SMTP
  • https://matrix.org/ and https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
• Figure out how to make Intellij to run maven targets on build. It's annoying that build steps are missed when building and running this project only in Intellij.

The application can be built using the following command:

# Make sure the assets are downloaded for the frontend app
./scripts/app-get-assets.sh

mvnw clean package

If required, a Docker image can be created with the Spring Boot plugin. Add SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=production as environment variable when running the container.

mvnw spring-boot:build-image -Dspring-boot.build-image.imageName=com.pehrs/control-booth

Before you start you need to setup a few hostnames that resolves to your developer host. The default configuration assumes two hosts

• control-booth.org - The frontend/backend service
• auth.nsa2.com - Authentication provider (keycloak)

One way of configuring this (if you do not have control over you DNS service) is to do a local override in your /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 auth.nsa2.com
127.0.0.1 control-booth.org

I was not able to make the above /etc/hosts override to work in my local setup and had to add some overrides in my DNS server instead.

# Start needed services
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up -d

# Start the backend service
mvn spring-boot:run

# Make sure the assets are downloaded for the frontend app
./scripts/app-get-assets.sh

# Start the front end (will open localhost:3000)
cd app
npm install
npm run start

Services:

Once everything is up and running then you should be able to login with user "matti.pehrs" with the password "pass".

java -Dspring.profiles.active=production -jar ./target/control-booth-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar