Detection of component metadata based on code analysis

It would be helpful to have a generic way to detect information about components.

Context

I’m in the process of integrating techdocs-cli into our Jenkins pipeline. I want it to be very easy for developers to start using this functionality by having the platform automatically figure out how documentation should be built. We will provide an escape valve to allow developers to go off the beaten path but we want to provide convenient defaults for technologies in our ecosystem.

We’re planning to have a Jenkins DLS job called buildDocs which will automatically select the mechanism based on information about the component. We’ll modify the onboarding screen to explain how documentation will be built for each component, but I need to know what technologies are being used so I can determine how to build the documentation.

Feature Request

It would be helpful if we had this information available inside of Backstage. I would imagine that the actual detection mechanism could be distributed as a library so it can be used in different environments.

Possible Implementation

I don’t know. This is why I created this issue. I tried to Google for a library that does the detection of technologies but I couldn’t find anything. I know GitHub has information about code that’s in the repo but it doesn’t provide information about the root of that project.

I would love your thoughts

[taras]

@freben your answer is what I was looking for. I can essentially use annotations but just need to keep simple as strings.

[freben]

Just a quick note that specifically annotations, do not support any other value types than strings.