CI/CD Integration

The problem​

Organizations operate with distributed teams, multiple repositories, and external systems that change constantly. AsyncAPI specifications get updated in one repository, OpenAPI schemas evolve in another, and event definitions change across your architecture. When documentation lives separately from these systems, keeping everything synchronized becomes a manual burden that teams cannot sustain.

Traditional documentation approaches force a choice between accuracy and effort. You can manually update docs after every change, but this becomes unsustainable as your architecture grows. Or you can accept that documentation will drift out of sync, losing the trust of your teams and becoming another neglected artifact that nobody references.

The solution​

EventCatalog treats documentation as code that lives in your Git workflow. Because everything is stored in Git and you host the catalog yourself, you can integrate it directly into your CI/CD pipelines and deploy it as frequently as your architecture demands. Some organizations rebuild their catalogs hundreds of times per day.

The workflow model is entirely up to you. Teams just getting started often begin with simple time-based automation, scheduling a cron job to rebuild the catalog every hour or every day. This requires minimal setup but immediately ensures documentation stays current without manual intervention.

More mature teams evolve toward event-driven documentation. When a developer pushes a change to an AsyncAPI specification or updates an OpenAPI file, this triggers an automated rebuild. The change flows through your CI/CD pipeline, generators pull the updated schemas, and a fresh version deploys automatically. Your documentation updates within minutes of the actual change.

EventCatalog works with whatever CI/CD platform your organization already uses. Teams successfully integrate it with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and many other systems. The GitOps-based approach means you define your deployment pipeline using the same tools and practices you use for your applications. There is no vendor lock-in, just standard CI/CD workflows.

Because you own the data and host the catalog yourself, you have complete control over how and when documentation updates happen. You can sync with external systems continuously or on a schedule. You can trigger rebuilds based on specific events or run them manually. The flexibility lets you design a documentation workflow that matches how your organization actually operates.

How this can help you​

When documentation automatically stays synchronized with your systems, teams start trusting it again. Developers know that the API specifications they see in the catalog match what is actually deployed. Architects make decisions confident that the architecture view reflects current reality. New team members onboard with documentation that accurately represents your systems as they exist today.

Distributed teams particularly benefit from this approach. When you have developers across different time zones working in separate repositories, manual documentation coordination becomes nearly impossible. Automated syncing means changes made by a team in one location automatically flow into the catalog, keeping everyone working from the same understanding of your architecture regardless of where they sit.

The trust that comes from always-current documentation changes how teams use EventCatalog. Instead of treating it as a reference to occasionally consult, it becomes a tool they actively rely on for daily work. Both humans and AI systems can reference the catalog knowing the information is current and accurate. Documentation transforms from a compliance checkbox into an operational tool that genuinely helps teams work more effectively.