Integrate Apicurio Registry with EventCatalog
I'm happy to announce the release of the EventCatalog Apicurio Registry plugin. This plugin allows you to import schemas from Apicurio Registry into EventCatalog and keep them in sync alongside your documentation.
Importing your schemas into EventCatalog gives you the ability to:
- Add more value to your schemas with business context and ownership
- Map your schemas to your producers and consumers in EventCatalog and keep them in sync
- Discover your schemas easier with the EventCatalog Schema Explorer
- Assign ownership (users and teams) to your schemas
- Automate documentation from your AsyncAPI and OpenAPI specifications hosted in your Apicurio Registry
- Visualize the bigger picture with the EventCatalog Visualizer
- Access your schemas with the EventCatalog Schema API for your LLMs or testing
- Connect your LLMs with the EventCatalog MCP server to get schemas for your LLMs
- And more...
In this blog post I'll walk you through the features of the plugin and how to get started.
What is Apicurio Registry?
Apicurio Registry is an open-source schema registry that provides a centralized repository for managing schemas and API artifacts in event-driven and message-based architectures. For architects building distributed systems, Apicurio Registry offers a powerful solution for schema validation, versioning, and governance with support for multiple schema formats including Avro, JSON Schema, Protobuf, OpenAPI, and AsyncAPI.
Apicurio Registry supports both V2 and V3 APIs, giving teams flexibility in how they manage their schemas. Whether you're running it as a standalone service or as part of a larger infrastructure, Apicurio Registry helps ensure consistency across your event-driven architecture.
Why integrate Apicurio Registry with EventCatalog?
EventCatalog helps organizations understand and manage their event-driven architectures by providing comprehensive documentation of domains, services, and messages.
While schema registries capture the technical contract of your events, EventCatalog preserves the crucial context often lost in traditional documentation: ownership details, business context, schema evolution history, and visual representations of your message flows.
The Apicurio Registry plugin creates a seamless connection between your schema registry and EventCatalog, giving you the best of both worlds.
You maintain all the powerful features of Apicurio's schema management while enriching your developer experience with EventCatalog's visualization capabilities, detailed documentation, governance tools, and enhanced discoverability.
This integration helps teams not just track what schemas exist, but understand how they fit into the broader architectural landscape and how they've evolved over time.
How the plugin works
The Apicurio Registry plugin maps your schemas into logical services and domains within your organization. Teams can configure which schemas each service produces or consumes using flexible filters based on exact artifact IDs, prefixes, suffixes, or string matching.
When Apicurio schemas are imported into EventCatalog, they become more than just technical contracts - they gain rich contextual information that helps teams understand their broader impact. This includes crucial details like schema ownership, business context, and the producer-consumer relationships between services.
The plugin also supports attaching OpenAPI and AsyncAPI specifications stored in your Apicurio Registry directly to services. You can even chain generators together, running the OpenAPI or AsyncAPI generators on these specifications to automatically create message documentation from your specs.
Any markdown and documentation added to your messages are persisted between versions, so you can add more value to your schemas and keep your documentation up-to-date as schemas evolve.
Getting started
To get started with the Apicurio Registry integration, you'll need:
- An Apicurio Registry instance (V2 or V3)
- Schemas registered in your Apicurio Registry
- An EventCatalog license key for Apicurio Registry integration (14-day free trial)
The setup takes just a few minutes. Read the installation guide to configure your integration, or explore the example project to see it in action.
Summary
Apicurio Registry is a powerful open-source tool for managing schemas in event-driven architectures. We created our Apicurio Registry integration to help you unlock more value from your schema registries.
The Apicurio Registry plugin allows you to map your schemas to services and domains within your organization, helping your team understand how schemas are produced and consumed across your architecture. With support for multiple schema formats and flexible filtering options, you can document exactly what matters to your teams.
EventCatalog syncs with your schema registry and persists any additional contextual information you add, including documentation, ownership, and relationships. This context carries forward as your schemas evolve, creating a living history of your event-driven architecture.
Using the Schema Explorer you can quickly find schemas in your architecture, understand the history of your schemas, or connect your schemas to your LLMs with the EventCatalog MCP server.
Getting started should take just a few minutes and you can read our guide here.
If you have any questions you can join us on our Discord server.