Backstage

What is Backstage?

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals.

The philosophy behind Backstage is simple: Don't expose your engineers to the full complexity of your infrastructure tooling. Engineers should be shipping code — not figuring out a whole new toolset every time they want to implement the basics.

At Spotify we strongly believe that a better developer experience leads to happier and more productive engineers.

Overview

The Backstage platform consists of a number of different components:

• frontend - Main web application that users interact with. It's built up by a number of different Plugins.
• plugins - Each plugin is treated as a self-contained web app and can include almost any type of content. Plugins all use a common set of platform API's and reusable UI components. Plugins can fetch data either from the backend or through any RESTful API exposed through the proxy.
• backend * - GraphQL aggregation service that holds the model of your software ecosystem, including organisational information and what team owns what software. The backend also has a Plugin model for extending its graph.
• proxy * - Terminates HTTPS and exposes any RESTful API to Plugins.
• identity * - A backend service that holds your organisation's metadata.

* not yet released

Getting started

Install Dependencies

To run the frontend, you will need to have the following installed:

• git
• NodeJS
• yarn

Running the frontend locally

Open a terminal window and start the web app using the following commands from the project root:

$ yarn # may take a while

$ yarn start

The final yarn start command should open a local instance of Backstage in your browser, otherwise open one of the URLs printed in the terminal.

Plugins

Creating a Plugin

To create a new plugin, make sure you're run yarn to install dependencies, then run the following:

$ yarn create-plugin

This will prompt you to enter an ID for your plugin, and then create your plugin inside the plugins/ directory. The plugin will be automatically included in the app by modifing the app's package.json and src/plugins.ts.

If you have yarn start already running you should be able to see the default page for your new plugin at localhost:3000/my-plugin, if you called the plugin "my-plugin".

Documentation

TODO: Add links to docs on backstage.io

License

Copyright 2020 Spotify AB.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0