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How to Add User Groups Directly in the Catalog

The Catalog in Harness IDP also supports addition of organizational entities like user groups directly, independent of their presence on the Harness Platform. These entities can be registered as kind: Group in the catalog as an YAML. Note that our recommendation is to use the Harness Platform Access Control for ingesting Users and User Groups into Harness IDP.

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The User Groups registered as entities in Catalog directly are not synced back with Harness Platform. The User Groups you add in IDP won't be available as a Harness Platform User Group. However, the opposite is true - any user group created in the Harness Platform at the Account level scope will be available in the IDP Catalog as well.

Kind: Group​

A group describes an organizational entity, such as a team, a business unit, or a loose collection of people in an interest group. Members of these groups are modeled in the catalog as User.

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You can not add Users directly into the catalog as Users are linked with authentication. You can add users on the Harness platform at the Account level.

Descriptor files for this kind may look as follows, where apiVersion, kind, spec.type and spec.children are required fields.

apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Group
metadata:
  name: infrastructure
  description: The infra business unit
spec:
  type: business-unit
  profile:
    displayName: Infrastructure
    email: infrastructure@example.com
    picture: https://example.com/groups/bu-infrastructure.jpeg
  parent: ops
  children: [backstage, other]
  members: [jdoe]

In the above example, children represent other user-groups and members represent the users under this user group.

At present we sync all your user-groups added in Harness Platform to IDP and you could find them under catalog page.

Here's and example of how a group is displayed as a Team page in IDP.

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In case there's a user-group already present with the same metadata.name while you're registering through your catalog or adding it to the platform, there would be no overwrite of the user-group if it's already present.

When to ingest groups directly into the Catalog rather than creating a Harness Platform User Group at the account level?​

  • If you need to represent a Group of Groups kind of hierarchy e.g. Org -> Department -> Team
  • If you would like the Groups definition to support annotations and tags to be consumed by plugins on the Groups page in Catalog.
  • If you already have a YAML representation of Groups and maintain it in a repository today somewhere.