Backstage OPA Backend Plugin

A backend plugin for Backstage, this plugin integrates with the Open Policy Agent (OPA) to facilitate policy evaluation.

It's a dependency of the following plugins:

• OPA Entity Checker
• OPA Policies
• OPA Authz React

By itself, this plugin does not provide any user-facing features.

This plugin is NOT required for the OPA Permissions Wrapper Module.

Pre-requisites

The only pre-requisites to use this plugin is that you have set up an OPA server. You can find more information on how to do that here. And you have a Backstage instance running. More info on how to do that here.

Or, you can check these docs for a quick guide on how to deploy OPA as a sidecar to your Backstage instance and add policies to it.

Installation

This plugin is currently used by the backstage-opa-entity-checker, and the backstage-opa-policies plugins. You can install it by running the following command:

Start with installing the package:

yarn add --cwd packages/backend @parsifal-m/plugin-opa-backend

In your app-config.yaml file, add the following:

openPolicyAgent:
  baseUrl: 'http://localhost:8181'
  entityChecker:
    enabled: true
    policyEntryPoint: 'entity_checker/violation'
  policyViewer:
    enabled: true

Configuration Note: The enabled flags control which OPA backend features are loaded. By default, all features are disabled (false). Set enabled: true only for the features you want to use:

• entityChecker.enabled - Enables the entity validation API endpoint
• policyViewer.enabled - Enables the policy viewing functionality

This allows selective loading of only the OPA functionality you need.

Import the plugin into the Backstage Backend

This assumes you are using the New Backend System, (you should be!) registering the plugin is much easier.

Add the following to your packages/backend/src/index.ts file:

// packages/backend/src/index.ts
import { createBackend } from '@backstage/backend-defaults';

const backend = createBackend();

// ...
backend.add(import('@parsifal-m/plugin-opa-backend'));

// ...
backend.start();

Note!

The entrypoint name in the app-config.yaml file should be the entrypoint to the policy in the rego file. You can find some working example of policies to use with this plugin here or in here

Contributing

I am happy to accept contributions and suggestions for these plugins, if you are looking to make significant changes, please open an issue first to discuss the changes you would like to make!

Please fork the repository and open a PR with your changes. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon.

Please remember to sign your commits with git commit -s so that your commits are signed!

License

This project is released under the Apache 2.0 License.