Enforce branch protection

Branch protection can bring an extra layer of security to your organization by ensuring that code must be reviewed and tested before being merged. With Tech Insights, you can ensure teams are using branch protection on their software.

In this tutorial, we’re going to:

1. Automatically scan Components in the Backstage catalog and record whether or not features like branch protection and required reviews are turned on or off for their GitHub repositories.
2. Visualize the percentage of components with branch protection turned on or off.

As we go through this process, you’ll learn how to create Data Sources that interact with the GitHub APIs.

Prerequisites

1. You must have a Personal Access Token (PAT) for GitHub set in Administration → Settings → Secrets → GITHUB_TOKEN. This PAT must have the “repo” scope enabled. It must also be created on an account that has admin permissions in GitHub. Tokens associated with regular user accounts will not be able to see the branch protection settings on all repositories. Learn more

   

Create a branch protection Data Source

1. Visit Tech Insights and click into the Data Sources tab. Click the ADD DATA SOURCE button to create a new data source.

   

2. Name the Data Source “GitHub branch protection” and give it the description “Detects if branch protection is turned on for the main branch of a repository.”

   

3. In the Data Provider section, select the built-in “/github/api” proxy and enter the Path Extension

   repos/{{ metadata.annotations["github.com/project-slug"] }}/branches/main/protection

4. In the input labelled “Select Entity to test data source against”, choose an Entity in the catalog that has the github.com/project-slug annotation set, and has branch protection turned on for the repository the annotation points at. Click the VIEW button and you should see a response from the GitHub API.

   

5. In the field extraction box, fill out the inputs with the following values.

   Fact name	JSONata query	Type
   Is branch protected	$exists(url)	Boolean
   Enforce admins enabled	enforce_admins.enabled	Boolean
   Linear history required enabled	required_linear_history.enabled	Boolean
   Allow force pushes enabled	allow_force_pushes.enabled	Boolean
   Allow deletions enabled	allow_deletions.enabled	Boolean
   Block creations enabled	block_creations.enabled	Boolean
   Required signatures enabled	required_signatures.enabled	Boolean
   Dismiss stale reviews	required_pull_request_reviews.dismiss_stale_reviews	Boolean
   Require code owner reviews	required_pull_request_reviews.require_code_owner_reviews	Boolean
   Require last push approval	required_pull_request_reviews.require_last_push_approval	Boolean
   Required approving review count	required_pull_request_reviews.required_approving_review_count	Integer
   Strict required status checks	required_status_checks.strict	Boolean

6. Click the CHECK FACTS button and you should see that the facts are successfully extracted from the test response.

   

7. In the “Applies to” section, set the following filters:

   Type	Component
   Lifecycle	Production
   Has Annotation	github.com/project-slug

8. Save the Data Source. After a minute or two, you should see results start to come in.

   

Visualise the percentage of Components with branch protection

Roadie Data Sources comes with a built-in visualisation panel which lets us get an overview of the Dockerfile base image versions being used. When viewing a Data Source, expand the “Facts visualization” section to see it.

This chart tells us that 81% of Components have branch protection turned on in their repositories.