Backstage Weekly 68 - 1.10 release, embedded Scaffolder

Hi y’all! We’ve got a new release with lots of improvements on the Scaffolder, a guide to all the incident management plugins available on Backstage, and an upcoming feature that lets you embed Scaffolder templates right into an entity page to let teams act in context.

Backstage 1.10 release

Last week, the Backstage team released the new version: 1.10. This version includes a deprecation around creating new plugins and several new features in the Scaffolder.

Starting from this version, backstage-cli create-plugin is deprecated in favor of backstage-cli new. Previously, creating a new Backstage instance would be done through backstage-cli create and creating new plugins would be done through backstage-cli create-plugin, but this naming didn’t let you add the commands to your yarn scripts because create is a reserved word. From now on, you can invoke backstage-cli from your yarn scripts to do something like yarn new --select plugin. Review the Create a Backstage Plugin guide for more info.

Additionally, Backstage 1.10 brings improvements in the Scaffolder on different fronts. For instance, there’s a new package available to use the plugin’s UI components independently. There’s also a new action to create Sentry projects from the scaffolder with sentry:project:create. And you can now add examples to your actions documentation so it’s easier to write software templates with them:

For more details on the latest release, check out v.10.0 Release Notes.

Using managed Backstage lets you focus on building value for your team instead of learning internals and upgrading your instance. Get a Roadie Backstage demo

All the incident management plugins available in Backstage

A common use case for Backstage is to help Operations and Developers get on the same page when an incident occurs to resolve it more efficiently. In this blog post, I put together all the plugins that integrate your incident manager of choice into your Backstage instance, with screenshots and links to installation guides. Let me know if I missed any!

Embed the Scaffolder into an entity’s page

Let’s say you use Snyk—or any other vendor—for running security checks across your entities and have a plugin set up in Backstage for it. When a service doesn’t have the security checks vendor set up, instead of saying “No annotations found”, what if you could tell the entity’s owner, “hey, you don’t have security checks enabled in your service, set it up now with a few clicks” right in their entity page.

Thanks to Paul Cowan and Taras Mankovski from Frontside, you’ll be able to enable this kind of workflow. You’ll be able to use a EmbeddedScaffolderWorkflow component that will embed a fully functional Scaffolder template form and workflow where you need it.

Check out Paul’s PR for additional context, including a usage example and a video demo. Expect this feature to be present in Backstage 1.11.0 on February 14th (Frontside’s valentine’s gift for everyone?).

Talk to you next week!

Jorge L