# emc _The minimal, declarative service catalog._ ## Background In the last three jobs I've worked at, it's always been a hassle trying to locate the various dashboards, documentation, and support for a given project. I joined effx to try and help address just that. As I've been spinning up a new cluster, I found myself wanting a landing page for the systems that I use regularly. ## Building your catalog The `emc` service catalog is defined using a simple Golang script. This makes it easy for engineers to drop in their own functionality for rendering links, link groups, or services. For an example, see the provided `grafana` package which includes several of my personal dashboards for different systems. ```go // catalog.go //go:build ignore // +build ignore package main import ( "github.com/mjpitz/emc/catalog" "github.com/mjpitz/emc/catalog/grafana" "github.com/mjpitz/emc/catalog/linkgroup" "github.com/mjpitz/emc/catalog/service" ) func main() { catalog.Serve( catalog.Service( "Drone", service.LogoURL("https://path/to/drone-logo.png"), service.URL("https://drone.example.com"), service.Description("Drone is a self-service Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams."), service.Metadata("Contact", "drone@example.com"), service.LinkGroup( "Dashboards", linkgroup.Link("Drone", grafana.Drone("cicd", "drone")), linkgroup.Link("Golang", grafana.Golang("cicd", "drone")), linkgroup.Link("Litestream", grafana.Litestream("cicd", "drone")), linkgroup.Link("Redis Queue", grafana.Redis("cicd", "drone-redis-queue")), ), service.LinkGroup( "Documentation", linkgroup.Link("docs.drone.io", "https://docs.drone.io/"), ), ), // ... ) } ``` ## Hosting your catalog Once you've built your catalog, you can easily run a landing page by executing the catalog file. ```sh $ go run ./catalog.go ``` This starts a web server for you to interact with on `localhost:8080`. If `:8080` is already in use, you can configure the bind address by passing the `-bind_address` flag with the desired host and port.

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### Exporting your catalog Instead of needing to compile a binary or host your catalog using `go run`, you can export your catalog to HTML or JSON. This makes it easy to drop into existing self-host platforms or leverage with other popular systems. ```sh $ go run ./catalog.go -output html > index.html $ go run ./catalog.go -output json > catalog.json ``` ### Protecting your catalog using oauth-proxy Regardless of how you host your catalog, you'll likely want to protect access to it. An easy way to do this is using the [oauth-proxy][] project. This project provides common OAuth2 client functionality to any project, making it easy to require authentication in order to access a system / project. Until I have more of a concrete guide, you can follow my setup [here](https://github.com/mjpitz/mjpitz/blob/main/infra/helm/catalog/values.yaml). A simple analogy to this deployment would be a docker compose file with two services, one for the oauth-proxy and the other for the catalog (bound to 127.0.0.1). Using the new `-output` functionality, this deployment could definitely be simplified. [oauth-proxy]: https://oauth2-proxy.github.io/oauth2-proxy