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 all your infrastructure tooling and services -- hide it behind a single centralized, consistent user-friendly interface.

At Spotify we 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 all use a common set of platform API's and reusable UI components. Each plugin is treated as a self-contained web app and can include almost any type of content. 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.

Getting started

Install Dependencies

To run the frontend, you will need to have git, NodeJS, and yarn installed.

For running the backend, depending on your OS, you need Docker Desktop for Mac, Docker Desktop for Windows, or for Linux, docker and docker-compose.

The above dependencies are enough to run and work on the Backstage frontend packages. To develop backend services, there are some more tools to install, see backend/README.md. To update protobuf definitions, you will need another set of tools, see proto/README.md.

Running Locally

The full local system consists of a collection of backend services, as well as a web application. From the root of the project directory, run the following in a terminal to start up all backend services locally:

$ cd backend

$ docker-compose up --build

Once the backend services are up and running, open a separate 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

License

Copyright 2020 Spotify AB.

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