Backline IDP

Backline is a minimalistic Internal Developer Portal (IDP) inspired by Backstage, built using Go and HTMX. It provides a flexible and extensible platform for exploring various developer resources.

Table of Contents

• Demo
• Features
• Why?
• Getting Started
• Contributing
• License

Demo

Check out deployed demo app loaded with same entities that backstage use for their demo app and backstage itself:

https://backline-demo.koyeb.app

https://backline.onrender.com

Some features may be disabled (for example "Scan" button)

Features

• Use existing backstage entities: Backline can be used with your existing Backstage entity definitions, so you can use your existing entity definitions and metadata.
• No scaffolding: You don't need to worry about setting up a complex backend or frontend, Backline handles it all for you. (see "./cmd" directory for examples)
• Plugin System: Backline supports a simple, type-safe plugin system, allowing developers to extend and customize the portal's functionality with ease. (see "./plugins" directory)
• OAuth2 Integration: Authentication and authorization using OAuth2.

Why?

• Lower learning curve: Backline is designed to be easier to learn and use.
• Simpler upgrades: Unlike Backstage, which requires scaffolding and is hard to upgrade, Backline isn't scaffolded and should work just by updating go.mod.
• Easy plugin development:
  • Plugins register themselves and do not require any code modifications (for now you need to include them into your main file as dependency. Later should be possible to just drop them as *.so files into plugins folder).
  • Plugins implement statically typed interfaces, making them easy to implement and detect version incompatibilities.
• Addressing Backstage issues:
  • Backstage does not support search on openapi and asyncapi specs (closed as not planned backstage/backstage#22802).
  • Backstage does not respect some relations like apiProvidedBy out of the box backstage/backstage#25387.
  • Plugins use different HTTP clients that may not respect proxy settings help-im-behind-a-corporate-proxy.

Getting Started

To get started with Backline you need to add as least few plugins or specify implementations for core functionality

Let's start with a simple example of running just catalog and scanner with minimalistic set of plugins We will use the following plugins/features:

• Discovery for entities on file system
• PostgreSQL plugin for storage (both entity and as Key-Value)
• PostgreSQL plugin for distributed lock (using pg_try_advisory_xact_lock)
• Default plugin for scheduler (this is only option for now)
• Default theme (with dark and light modes depending on OS theme)

	application := app.App{
		// run catalog and scanner

		PluggableDeps: app.PluggableDeps{
			EntityDiscoveries: []core.Discovery{    // Add Location Readers so backline knows how to read entities from different sources
				&fs.Discovery{},                      // github repo to search entities
			},
			EntityRepo:         &pg.Repo{},         // use postgres implementation explicitly.
			KeyValStore:        &kv.PgKV{},         // use postgres KV store explicitly.
			JobScheduler:       &store.Scheduler{}, // job scheduler plugin. Basic implementation that uses KV store and Locker for scheduling and synchronizing tasks
			DistributedLocker:  &store.Locker{},    // distributed lock plugin
			ScannerPlugin:      &scanner.Plugin{},  // add scanner plugin to scan/read entities. 
		},
		Plugins: []core.Plugin{
			catalog.Plugin{},                       // add web interface for catalog
			stock.Theme{},                          // add stock theme for catalog
		},
	}

  err := application.Run()
  if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
  }

Although configuration can be done by populating plugin fields directly in the code, we will use a configuration file For sake of simplicity we will disable some security features (https, csrf, cors are enabled by default)

core:
  server:
    https:
      disabled: true
    csrf:
      disabled: true
    cors:
      disabled: true
  logger:
    level: env:LOG_LEVEL
    format: json
  repo:
    pg:
      dsn: env:PG_DSN
  kv:
    pg:
      dsn: env:PG_DSN
  lock:
    pg:
      dsn: env:PG_DSN
  scanner:
    enableScanEndpoint: true
    enableScanButton: true
locations:
  fs:
    - "./entities"

You can populate config file directly or use env variables for config values

PG_DSN=postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/backline?sslmode=disable
LOG_LEVEL=INFO

Run the application

go run main.go --config {your-config-location}/config.yaml

Open http://localhost:8080 and you should see the catalog UI. Click on Scan entities button to start scanning entities in directory ./entities

See more examples in ./examples directory

Core dependencies and Plugins

For more info about plugins and how to write them, see plugin readme

Contributing

Contributions to Backline are welcome! If you'd like to contribute, please fork the repository and submit a pull request with your changes.

License

Backline is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.