Backstage Weekly 73 - Paginated Catalog results (!), fast link to API Docs

Hi y’all! When I saw snow in Barcelona during my morning commute, I knew something big was coming.

• And indeed, I’m super excited to share that the epic quest to add paginated results to the Catalog entities list has been merged!
• In other upcoming news, you’ll soon have a faster way to access API Docs from the dependencies widgets.
• We also present three new vendor integration plugins.

Paginated Catalog results

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s anxiously followed the PR opened by vinzscam last June to add pagination to the Catalog entities list. And no wonder: a common gripe adopters hear from their users is how Backstage can be significantly slow when loading the Catalog page. A big factor for this sluggishness is that you need to get every single entity when you visit that page, as pagination is only implemented in the UI.

Thanks to the months-long effort championed by Vincenzo, which required more changes in the Catalog done through other PRs and contributors, Backstage will offer a paginated API for querying entities:

This features opens up great UX possibilities, such as a much snappier experience when browsing the Catalog. The new API is expected to be part of the next Backstage release (1.12), scheduled for March 14th. Thanks everyone involved in this effort!

🧡 Latest in Roadie: 1.11 and automated language tagging 🧡 Every Roadie customer is now running on Backstage 1.11 and profiting from a GitHub automation that tags entities according to their language. Check out Roadie’s new feature.

Fast links to API Docs

Backstage lets you specify which APIs your entity provides, or which APIs it consumes. You can render this information in the entity overview page by adding the respective widgets. Now, thanks to JSPRH, instead of just listing the related APIs, the users will have access to a direct link to the relevant API Docs.

This feature will be part of the upcoming Backstage release, schedules in about two weeks. To learn more and check out a video demo, head over the PR.

New vendor plugins: StackStorm, kubevela, Octopus deploy

The Backstage ecosystem keeps growing, now with the addition of of three new plugins that integrate Backstage with Cloud native vendors. If you use StackStorm, Kubevela, or Octopus Deploy, discover the new plugins available in Backstage’s marketplace.

Talk to you next week!

Jorge L