The Meshery Catalog

What is the Meshery Catalog? 🔗

The Meshery Catalog is a curated library of designs, filters, and patterns that the Meshery community and your organization can publish, discover, and deploy. It operates like a package registry for infrastructure intent: you publish a design once, and any team member - or any coding agent with access to Meshery - can import and deploy it on demand.

The Catalog solves a specific problem: raw YAML checked into a repository is opaque to anyone who did not write it. A Catalog entry wraps that YAML in a named, versioned, documented artifact with a description, tags, compatibility information, and a visual preview rendered by Kanvas. The artifact is searchable, filterable, and deployable without requiring the recipient to understand the underlying manifests.

Saving a Design to the Catalog 🔗

After you have imported and validated a design (as you did in the previous lesson), you can publish it to the Catalog directly from Kanvas.

1. Open the design in Kanvas.
2. Click the Publish button in the top toolbar.
3. In the publish dialog, fill in the required metadata:
   • Name - a short, descriptive label (e.g. microservices-demo)
   • Description - one or two sentences about what the design deploys and why
   • Tags - keywords that make the design discoverable (kubernetes, microservices, demo)
   • Compatibility - the Kubernetes version range the design targets
4. Click Publish to Catalog.

Meshery sends the design YAML and metadata to the Catalog backend. After a brief review period for community submissions, the design appears in the Catalog UI and is discoverable via mesheryctl:

mesheryctl catalog list
mesheryctl catalog search --name microservices-demo

For private organizational Catalogs (available in Meshery Cloud), published designs are immediately visible to members of your organization without a review step.

Using Catalog Entries as Templates 🔗

A Catalog entry is not just an artifact you deploy as-is - it is a template you can clone, modify, and re-publish. This is the recommended starting point for new designs: find the closest matching Catalog entry, clone it, adapt the components to your environment, and publish the variant under a new name.

To clone a Catalog entry from the CLI:

mesheryctl catalog clone --id <catalog-entry-id> --name my-custom-design

This pulls the design into your local Meshery instance as a new draft with the name you specified. Open it in Kanvas, make your changes, and follow the publish flow above when ready.

Templates are especially valuable when a coding agent is generating infrastructure. An agent can use a Catalog entry as a base context - passing the YAML to its context window - and then apply targeted mutations to produce a variant that matches a specific requirement. The agent does not need to produce valid Kubernetes YAML from scratch; it only needs to make correct, scoped changes to a known-good template.

Discovering Community Designs 🔗

The public Meshery Catalog at meshery.io/catalog contains designs contributed by the community. Categories include:

Browse the Catalog in the UI or filter by tag:

mesheryctl catalog list --tag observability

To import a community design directly into your Meshery instance by its Catalog ID:

mesheryctl design import -f https://catalog.meshery.io/<catalog-entry-id>.yaml -s "Kubernetes Manifest"

The academy’s designs/observability-stack.yaml file is modeled on the kind of entry you would find in the Observability category - a complete Prometheus and Grafana deployment ready to scrape a running cluster. Import it with the same command you used for the microservices demo:

mesheryctl design import -f designs/observability-stack.yaml -s "Kubernetes Manifest"

Open it in Kanvas to see how a multi-component observability stack is represented as a design topology, then consider how you would publish a variant of it to your organization’s private Catalog.

The next lesson extends the Catalog concept into version control: backing your designs with GitHub so that every change is auditable and pull requests carry an infrastructure preview.