Creating a Backstage Catalog Provider

When to use this skill

• Building a module that ingests catalog entities from an external source (Azure DevOps, GitHub topic search, internal asset registry, JSON file, etc.)
• Editing an existing catalog-backend-module-* plugin
• The ingestion runs periodically (provider model) — for one-shot processing of an entity definition file, write a CatalogProcessor instead

What you build

A catalog provider is a backend module (createBackendModule({ pluginId: 'catalog', ... })) that registers a provider against an extension point. There are two provider models — pick based on data volume.

Choose the model first: normal vs incremental