backstage/docs/features/techdocs

id, title, sidebar_label, description

id	title	sidebar_label	description
techdocs-overview	TechDocs Documentation	Overview	TechDocs is Spotify’s homegrown docs-like-code solution built directly into Backstage

What is it?

TechDocs is Spotify’s homegrown docs-like-code solution built directly into Backstage. This means engineers write their documentation in Markdown files which live together with their code.

Today, it is one of the core products in Spotify’s developer experience offering with 2,400+ documentation sites and 1,000+ engineers using it daily. Read more about TechDocs and the philosophy in its announcement blog post. 🎉

Features

• Discover technical documentation of a service closer to the service page in Backstage catalog.

• Create new documentation-only sites for any purpose by just writing Markdown.

• Explore the large ecosystem of MkDocs plugins to create a rich reading experience.

• A tightly coupled feedback loop with the developer workflow. (Future work)

• A developer ecosystem for creating TechDocs widgets. (Future work)

Platforms supported

See TechDocs Architecture to get an overview of where these providers are used.

Source Code Hosting Provider	Support Status
GitHub	Yes ✅
GitHub Enterprise	Yes ✅
BitBucket	Yes ✅
Azure DevOps	Yes ✅
GitLab	Yes ✅
GitLab Enterprise	Yes ✅

File Storage Provider	Support Status
Local Filesystem of Backstage app	Yes ✅
Google Cloud Storage (GCS)	Yes ✅
Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3	Yes ✅
Azure Blob Storage	Yes ✅

Reach out to us if you want to request more platforms.

Project roadmap

Ongoing work 🚧

Beta release - Milestone

• It should be possible and easy to use TechDocs in most environments across organizations.
• Minimal bugs, better error handling and scalable backend and frontend.
• Documentation Search
• TechDocs Homepage with basic features

Future work 🔮

General Availability (GA) release - Milestone

• Bugs are rare, TechDocs APIs are stable and scales easily in large organizations.
• Better integration with Scaffolder V2 (e.g. easy to choose and plug docs with Software Templates).
• Possible to configure several aspects about TechDocs e.g. URL, homepage, theme.

Implement Feedback loop - Milestone

• A feedback loop between documentation reader and writer using TechDocs
• The + in docs-like-code+ experience

TechDocs widget framework

Platformize TechDocs with a widget framework so that it is easy for TechDocs contributors to add pieces of functionality and for users to choose which functionalities they want to adopt. As a pre-requisite, the re-architecture of TechDocs frontend RFC needs to be addressed.

Tech stack

Stack	Location
Frontend Plugin	@backstage/plugin-techdocs
Backend Plugin	@backstage/plugin-techdocs-backend
CLI (for local development and generating docs)	@techdocs/cli
Docker Container (for generating docs)	techdocs-container

Contact us

Reach out to us in the #docs-like-code channel of our Discord chatroom.