@backstage/backend-openapi-utils

@backstage/openapi-utils

Summary

This package is meant to provide a typed Express router for an OpenAPI spec. Based on the oatx library and adapted to override Express values.

Getting Started

Configuration

1. Run yarn --cwd <package-dir> backstage-cli package schema openapi generate to translate your src/schema/openapi.yaml to a new Typescript file in src/schema/openapi.generated.ts. The command will try to execute both a lint and prettier step on the generated file, where applicable.

2. In your plugin's src/service/createRouter.ts,

import { createOpenApiRouter } from '../schema/openapi.generated';
// ...
export function createRouter() {
  const router = createOpenApiRouter();
  // add routes to router, it's just an express router.
  return router;
}

1. Add @backstage/backend-openapi-utils to your package.json's dependencies.

Why do I need to add this to dependencies? If you check the src/schema/openapi.generated.ts file, we're creating a router stub for you with the @backstage/backend-openapi-utils package.

Customization

If the out of the box router doesn't work, you can do the following,

import { createOpenApiRouter } from '../schema/openapi.generated';
// ...
export function createRouter() {
  // See https://github.com/cdimascio/express-openapi-validator/wiki/Documentation for available options.
  const router = createOpenApiRouter(validatorOptions);
  // add routes to router, it's just an express router.
  return router;
}

If you need even more control -- say for example you wanted to update the spec at runtime -- you can do the following,

import { spec } from '../schema/openapi.generated';
import { createValidatedOpenApiRouter } from '@backstage/backend-openapi-utils';
// ...
export function createRouter() {
  // Update the spec here.
  const newSpec = { ...spec, myproperty123: 123 };

  // See https://github.com/cdimascio/express-openapi-validator/wiki/Documentation for available options.
  const router = createValidatedOpenApiRouter<typeof newSpec>(
    newSpec,
    validatorOptions,
  );
  // add routes to router, it's just an express router.
  return router;
}

FAQs

Why am I getting unknown as the type for a response?

This can happen when you have a charset defined in your response.content section. Something like response.content['application/json; charset=utf-8:'] will cause this issue.

INTERNAL

Limitations

1. as const makes all fields readonly To ensure a good DX of using a simple imported JSON spec, we want to remove any type issues between readonly arrays and mutable arrays. Typescript does not allow them to be compared, so converting all imports from the openapi3-ts library to readonly is important. This is achieved through the ImmutableObject type in types/immutable.ts.

...
// We want an interface like this,
Router() as ApiRouter<typeof spec>

// Not an interface like this,
Router() as ApiRouter<DeepWriteable<typeof spec>>
...

Future Work

Response Validation

This is a murky ground and something that will take a while to gain adoption. For now, keep responses in the spec and at the type level, but will need to work to drive adoption of response validation.

Common Error Format

With the new createRouter method, we can start to control error response formats for input and coercion errors.