// the find
immobiliare/backstage-plugin-gitlab
Backstage plugins to interact with GitLab
A Backstage plugin pair (frontend + backend) that surfaces GitLab project data — pipelines, MRs, issues, contributors, README — inside the Backstage catalog. Built and maintained by ImmobiliareLabs, the Italian real estate platform, so it has real production usage behind it. If your organization runs GitLab and Backstage together, this fills a gap that Backstage's own GitLab integration doesn't cover.
Multi-instance GitLab support is first-class, not bolted on — you can point different catalog entities at different GitLab hosts via annotation. The GitlabFillerProcessor auto-populates annotations from the catalog-info.yaml location, which eliminates the tedious manual annotation step most plugins require. The plugin supports both the legacy and new Backstage backend systems, so you're not forced to migrate your entire backend to adopt it. The client is designed to be subclassed, so if your GitLab version has API quirks or you need custom behavior, you can override individual methods rather than forking.
Hard cap of top 20 items for builds, MRs, and issues — pagination exists for some but not all of these, and 20 is a real constraint for active projects. README rendering has 'partial support for GLFM' which in practice means GitLab-flavored markdown features like task lists, mermaid diagrams, and custom emoji will silently break or render wrong. OIDC/OAuth support explicitly does not work with multi-instance setups, so if you need SSO-based auth across multiple GitLab hosts, you're out of luck. The new frontend system support is still marked alpha, meaning the extension-based configuration can change under you between Backstage releases.