Users and teams autodiscovery

The Red Hat Developer Hub catalog can be set up to ingest organizational data — users and groups — directly from GitLab. The result is a hierarchy of User and Group entities that mirrors your org setup.

Once we have integrated GitLab with Red Hat Developer Hub, we need to enable the autodiscovery capabilities of users and groups. That requires to enable the backstage-plugin-catalog-backend-module-gitlab-org-dynamic dynamic plugin provided by Red Hat Developer Hub.

Run:

oc apply -f ./content/modules/ROOT/examples/exercises/dynamic-plugins-4.yaml -n rhdh-gitlab

Add this to the ConfigMap:

  catalog:
    providers:
      gitlab:
        myGitLab:
          host: gitlab.${BASEDOMAIN}
          # ... previous GitLab configuration
          orgEnabled: true
          #group: org/teams # Required for gitlab.com when `orgEnabled: true`. Optional for self managed. Must not end with slash. Accepts only groups under the provided path (which will be stripped)
          allowInherited: true # Allow groups to be ingested even if there are no direct members.
          groupPattern: '[\s\S]*'
          restrictUsersToGroup: false

Disable the dangerouslyAllowSignInWithoutUserInCatalog property to load only valid users.

Or run:

oc apply -f ./content/modules/ROOT/examples/exercises/rhdh-app-configmap-4.yaml -n rhdh-gitlab

Verify that users and teams are discovered.

A similar message is registered in the Red Hat Developer Hub pod to confirm the number of users and groups scanned: 
{"class":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider","level":"\u001b[32minfo\u001b[39m","message":"Scanned 3 users and processed 3 users","plugin":"catalog","service":"backstage","span_id":"2dcb52e328c672ad","target":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider:myGitLab","taskId":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider:myGitLab:refresh","taskInstanceId":"03798434-b9e9-45f0-8be6-330f0229e07a","timestamp":"2025-03-05 10:08:57","trace_flags":"01","trace_id":"f6b7b7e7a96250eeca0e1f2b355c00ac"}
{"class":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider","level":"\u001b[32minfo\u001b[39m","message":"Scanned 2 groups and processed 2 groups","plugin":"catalog","service":"backstage","span_id":"2dcb52e328c672ad","target":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider:myGitLab","taskId":"GitlabOrgDiscoveryEntityProvider:myGitLab:refresh","taskInstanceId":"03798434-b9e9-45f0-8be6-330f0229e07a","timestamp":"2025-03-05 10:08:57","trace_flags":"01","trace_id":"f6b7b7e7a96250eeca0e1f2b355c00ac"}

Catalog shows User and Group entities matching GitLab users (user1, user2) and groups (team-a, team-b).

Learning outcomes

By completing this module, you should understand:

  • How to enable GitLab discovery

  • How to configure to discover organizational data (users and groups)

  • How to disable dangerouslyAllowSignInWithoutUserInCatalog for valid users only