If your team is not yet using Backstage, Tentacle can still be a valuable tool to enhance your GitHub-based development workflow. While Tentacle was designed to work seamlessly with Backstage, it can also be used as a standalone solution.

By adding a catalog-info.yaml file to the root directory of your GitHub repository, Tentacle will automatically detect and display the links defined within it.

The following snippet is the bare minimum that Tentacle needs.

catalog-info.yaml
apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  links:
    - url: https://admin.example.com
      title: Admin Dashboard

However, it’s important to note that this minimal version of the catalog-info.yaml file is not a fully valid Backstage configuration. A complete, Backstage-compatible catalog-info.yaml file would look like this:

catalog-info.yaml
apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: artist-service
  links:
    - url: https://admin.example.com
      title: Admin Dashboard
spec:
  type: service
  lifecycle: production
  owner: team-awesome

However besides kind: Component and metadata.links Tentacle will ignore all the other values.

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Gradual Adoption of Backstage

If your team is considering adopting Backstage in the future, Tentacle can be a great first step. By using Tentacle to manage your links and resources within GitHub, you can gradually introduce your team to the benefits of a software catalog without the overhead of setting up a full Backstage instance right away.

As your team becomes more familiar with the advantages of a centralized software catalog, you can then explore the broader capabilities of Backstage and seamlessly integrate it with your existing Tentacle setup.