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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://backstage.spotify.com/docs/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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What is a Software Catalog?

The Portal Software Catalog is a centralized system that tracks ownership and metadata for all the software in your ecosystem — services, websites, libraries, data pipelines, datasets, and more. It’s available at /catalog in your Portal instance.
screenshot of software catalog homepage
It enables two main use-cases:
  1. Helping teams manage and maintain the software they own. Teams get a uniform view of all their software: services, libraries, websites, ML models, and more.
  2. Making all the software in your company, and who owns it, discoverable. No more orphan software hiding in the dark corners of your software ecosystem.

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Adding components to the catalog

When ingesting components, you choose how their metadata will be managed going forward:
screenshot showing the two catalog ingestion options: Managed by Portal and Managed by YAML files
  • Managed by Portal (Recommended) — Control and update metadata directly in the Portal UI. No catalog-info.yaml file is required. Ideal for fast onboarding and centralizing management.
  • Managed by YAML files — Maintain core metadata as code in YAML files stored in your repositories. Portal automatically syncs changes from GitHub.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of bulk catalog ingestion, see the Bulk catalog ingestion documentation.

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Manually register a component

You can register an individual component at /catalog-import. Enter either:
  • A link to an existing catalog-info.yaml entity file in your source control
  • A link to a repository (GitHub only) — Portal will discover all catalog-info.yaml files, or prepare a pull request to create one if none are found
screenshot of the Register an existing component page

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Static catalog configuration

In addition to manually registering components, you can register components through static configuration. Add component locations via /admin/plugin-settings/plugin/catalog under Locations. For example: 
Type: url
Target: https://github.com/backstage/backstage/blob/master/packages/catalog-model/examples/components/artist-lookup-component.yaml

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Creating new components through Portal

You can create new components directly from Portal using software templates. See Getting Started with the Scaffolder for more details.

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Finding software in the catalog

By default the software catalog shows components owned by the team of the logged-in user. Switch to All to see every component across your company’s software ecosystem. Inline search and column filtering make it easy to navigate large sets of components.

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