Knative Event Mesh plugin (dynamic)

The Event Mesh plugin is a Backstage plugin that allows you to view and manage Knative Eventing resources.

The Backstage plugin talks to a special backend that runs in the Kubernetes cluster and communicates with the Kubernetes API server.

A demo setup for this plugin is available at https://github.com/aliok/knative-backstage-demo.

For more information about the plugin, please see the documentation on Knative docs.

This distribution of the plugin is a dynamic plugin that can be installed in a Backstage instance that supports dynamic plugins.

Backstage has a WIP proposal to allow plugins to be loaded dynamically. While this is not done in upstream Backstage yet, Janus IDP has implemented this feature. The benefit of the dynamic plugin is it can be used without changing the source code of Backstage.

Installation

Prerequisites

• A Kubernetes cluster with Knative Eventing installed
• Knative Event Mesh plugin backend installed
• A Backstage instance with dynamic plugin support (e.g. Janus IDP)
• A service account for the Backstage backend to access the Kubernetes API

Install Knative Eventing by following the official documentation.

Install the backend and the relevant configuration in the Kubernetes cluster:

VERSION="latest" # or a specific version like knative-v1.15.0
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/knative-extensions/backstage-plugins/releases/${VERSION}/download/eventmesh.yaml

Janus Configuration

You need to follow the Janus IDP dynamic plugin installation instructions here: https://github.com/janus-idp/backstage-showcase/blob/main/showcase-docs/dynamic-plugins.md#installing-a-dynamic-plugin-package-in-the-showcase

For a quick test, download the plugin package and extract it to the dynamic-plugins-root directory in Janus IDP:

cd <path-to-Janus-IDP>/dynamic-plugins-root
pkg=@knative-extensions/plugin-knative-event-mesh-backend-dynamic
archive=$(npm pack $pkg)
tar -xzf "$archive" && rm "$archive"
mv package $(echo $archive | sed -e 's:\.tgz$::')

The plugin needs to be configured to talk to the backend. It can be configured in the app-config.yaml file of the Backstage instance and allows configuration of one or multiple providers.

Use a knativeEventMesh marker to start configuring the app-config.yaml file of Backstage:

catalog:
  ...
  providers:
    knativeEventMesh:
      dev:
        token: '${KNATIVE_EVENT_MESH_TOKEN}'     # SA token to authenticate to the backend
        baseUrl: '${KNATIVE_EVENT_MESH_BACKEND}' # URL of the backend installed in the cluster
        schedule: # optional; same options as in TaskScheduleDefinition
          # supports cron, ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
          frequency: { minutes: 1 }
          # supports ISO duration, "human duration" as used in code
          timeout: { minutes: 1 }

Please see the plugin installation documentation on Knative website for more information about the configuration requirements such as the token and the baseUrl.

Start your Janus IDP instance!

NOTE: If you have made any changes to the schedule in the app-config.yaml file, then restart to apply the changes.

Troubleshooting

When you start your Backstage application, you can see some log lines as follows:

[1] 2024-01-04T09:38:08.707Z knative-event-mesh-backend info Found 1 knative event mesh provider configs with ids: dev type=plugin