Overview

Thanks for checking out EchoLayer! The following is a guide to get you going as quickly as possible so you can start using EchoLayer to keep the ownership of your services up to date.

tl;dr

You’ll need to create an organization and an API Key, do some minor config in Backstage, install our plugins and drop a few snippets of Typescript code in Backstage and you’re good to go!

Here’s an example pull request of the changes you’ll be making.

Setup

<aside> 💡 This guide assumes you have already setup Backstage

</aside>

Setting up your Organization with EchoLayer

Prior to installing our plugins, you’ll need to first create an organization with EchoLayer and get yourself an API Key to use in order for Backstage to communicate with our platform.

Create an Organization and API Key with EchoLayer

  1. Visit https://app.echolayer.com to create your organization with EchoLayer. We only ask for a name for your org. Yes, that’s really it.

    <aside> 👉 You’ll need to authenticate with GitHub prior to this. We only ask for your email address so we can create a user account in EchoLayer for you.

    </aside>

  2. Once created, you’ll be redirected to the homepage for your organization in EchoLayer. Click on the link to visit the API Key page

    1. Generate a new API key
    2. Click the copy button
    3. Paste the value of the token temporarily somewhere you’ll have access to as you’ll need it momentarily (or just leave this open so you can come back and copy it)

Configure Backstage for EchoLayer

Add configuration values in Backstage for EchoLayer API calls

Create a Proxy as well as an EchoLayer key for the backend plugin in the app config file in Backstage at app-config.yaml:

proxy:
  '/echolayer/api':
    target: <https://api.echolayer.com/api>
    headers:
      Authorization: Bearer ${ECHOLAYER_API_KEY}

echolayer:
  apiKey: ${ECHOLAYER_API_KEY}

Expose your API key to Backstage

You’ll need to expose the value of your API key to Backstage so that the plugins you will be installing shortly have a token to use to authenticate your API requests from Backstage to the EchoLayer platform. There’s many ways to do this, but here are 2 ways to get you going quickly:

a) Set an environment variable with name ECHOLAYER_API_KEY in the environment Backstage runs in

b) Replace ${ECHOLAYER_API_KEY} in the app-config.yaml with the value of your API key