# Entando Component Repository

The Entando Component Repository (ECR) is meant to be a repository to share reusable components among different Entando instances.

The following glossary relates to the ECR and related concepts:

# Glossary

# Component

An Entando component - simply referred to as component - is a piece of reusable code/resource to be used in an Entando widget, page or application. Examples of components are widgets, microfrontends, content-types, labels, plugins, and static resources

# ECR Bundle

An ECR bundle - is a package containing one or more components and a 'descriptor.yaml' file providing information about the bundle. The bundle is published on an Git registry and is shared with an Entando application using the EntandoDeBundle custom resource.

# EntandoDeBundle custom resource

The EntandoDeBundle custom resource is a Kubernetes custom resource readable by the Entando6 operator. It’s used to provide information about an ECR bundle and make the bundle available in kubernetes for the entando-component-manager.

# Entando-component-manager

The entando-component-manager - a.k.a component-manager is part of the Entando6 app and dialogs both with the Kubernetes cluster via the entando-k8s-service and with the entando-core. The entando-component-manager reads the bundles from the cluster and exposes them via an API accessible from AppBuilder. The component-manager is also responsible of the installation/removal of components from entando-core

# Entando-K8S-service

The Entando-K8S-Service is part of the Entando infrastructure and is responsible for the low-level communication with the K8S cluster API.

# Architecture

ECR Architecture

From an architectural point of view, the ECR is composed of

  1. The EntandoDeBundles which contain the metadata associated with a bundle
  2. The Entando-k8s-service which reads the bundles from the cluster/namspace(s) and serves them via a consumable API
  3. The Component-manager which creates the connection between the EntandoApp and the K8S-service.

# Example flow

  1. The user lands on the ECR page in app-builder and wants to see the list of bundles shared with that EntandoApp

  2. AppBuilder asks the component-manager for the list of available bundles

  3. Component-manager queries the k8s-service to get the available bundles

  4. The k8s-service queries the cluster/namespace(s) it is able to read from for available bundles and returns the list to the component-manager

  5. Component-manager returns a list to App-Builder

  6. The user is able to see the available bundles and is able to install one or more of them

← Entando Component Manager →