User Guide¶

Welcome to the Farm User Guide. This section provides comprehensive documentation for end users who want to use Farm to manage their software components and documentation.

Overview¶

Farm provides a centralized portal that helps you:

• Organize and discover software components across your organization
• Maintain documentation associated with each component
• Manage user access and authentication

Getting Started¶

New to Farm? Start with the Getting Started guide to learn how to set up and begin using Farm.

Core Features¶

Component Catalog¶

The Catalog is the heart of Farm. It provides a centralized registry for all software components in your organization, including:

• Services and microservices
• Shared libraries
• APIs
• Websites and frontend applications
• Infrastructure resources (pipelines, queues, databases, clusters)
• Data assets (datasets, data pipelines, ML models)
• Security artifacts (secrets, policies, certificates)

Documentation Management¶

Farm allows you to manage documentation associated with each component. This helps teams:

• Keep documentation close to the components they describe
• Discover relevant documentation easily
• Maintain documentation versioning

Authentication¶

Learn about user authentication in Farm, including:

• User registration with password strength validation
• Login and JWT token management
• Refresh token rotation
• User roles and rate limiting

Organizations¶

Farm supports multi-tenant organizations, providing isolated scopes for catalog components, teams, pipelines, and environments. Each organization has members with role-based access:

• Create and manage organizations
• Add or remove members and assign roles (owner, admin, member)
• Scope resources to a specific organization using the X-Organization-Id request header

Environments and Deployments¶

Farm tracks deployment environments and component deployments, enabling:

• Environment management (development, staging, production, sandbox)
• Deployment recording with status tracking
• Deployment matrix showing latest versions across environments

Teams and Ownership¶

Organize your organization with team management:

• Create teams by type (dev, infra, security, data, platform)
• Assign members to teams
• Link catalog components to team ownership

CI/CD Integrations¶

Farm connects to external CI/CD platforms so teams can monitor builds, trigger pipelines, and view deployment status directly from the developer portal. Supported platforms: ArgoCD, CircleCI, Jenkins, and Travis CI. Each platform is connected per-organization using encrypted credentials stored in the database. See the CI/CD Integrations reference for endpoint details.

Helm Integration¶

Farm discovers Helm releases from Kubernetes Secrets and provides a dedicated UI card on the component detail page for components with a helmChart field in their catalog-info.yaml. See the Helm Integration guide for full details.

Kubernetes Operator¶

Farm connects to a Kubernetes cluster to discover running workloads, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and Argo Rollout statuses. Components annotated with farm.io/kubernetes-name are automatically linked to their cluster workloads. See the Kubernetes Operator guide for full details.

System Discovery¶

Farm provides a discovery mechanism to see which features and modules are currently active in your organization's portal. This allows users to:

• Identify active plugins and their versions
• Access a centralized list of system capabilities
• Stay informed about platform updates

Quick Links¶