Add support for disabling app-config validation at build time

[SoccerBoyMalloy]

We're deploying Backstage to several k8s environments and we're using kustomize to define per-environment entrypoints that each include their own app-config.<environment>.yaml config files. In an effort to reduce duplicate configuration, we're consolidating all common configuration into app-config.yaml - this common config includes references to environment variables. Now when we yarn build, it validates app-config.yaml and throws an error if any of the environment variables are missing (which they often are at build time). This means we have to move any common configuration that relies on environment variables back into the environment-specific configs so that app-config.yaml has no environment variables, and then only specify app-config.yaml at build time.

This poses a few questions:

1. Is this build time validation necessary?
2. We currently don't specify our app-config.<environment>.yaml configs during build time and things seem to work - that means much of our config already isn't being validated at build time. Should we be specifying them at build time?

Feature Suggestion

Add some kind of --disable-validation flag at build time.

Context

• The build docs don't indicate this is possible.
• We might be able to handle this by defining a custom schema, but that feels like the wrong approach.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[benjdlambert]

Until we have some way of loading the config from the backend for the frontend, then this needs to be built into the bundle so it needs to be at build time. Think we need to revisit how we're going to do that rather than adding this option. Will come back with an update on a possible way forward! :pray:

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.