Roadie’s Blog

Backstage Weekly 51 - improved Tech Docs for monorepos, multiple SonarQube instances

By Jorge LainfiestaAugust 8th, 2022

Hi, y’all! This week’s newsletter highlights contributions to simplifying setting up documentation for monorepos and to configure multiple SonarQube instances. We also share a 20% discount on KubeCon on-site tickets.

Better monorepo Tech Docs support

As pointed out by dariocurr, when you’re setting up documentation for a monorepo, you may end up having to do redundant work declaring docs_dir and nav for every subdirectoy.

Borrowing the author’s example, let’s say you have the following in your general mkdocs.yml:

Code snippet for general mkdocs file

Thanks to dariocurr, you can now leave docs_dir and nav blank on each subdirectory, so it picks up the parent’s config, as in the example below. Before you had to re-specify these properties in every file.

Code snippet: susbdirectory mkdocs file

The feature will be available in a release soon, check out the PR in the meantime.


If you’re working with monorepos, be sure to check out Roadie’s guide to modeling monorepos in Backstage.


Configure multiple SonarQube instances

Neemys championed the initiative of allowing different SonarQube instances to be specified for different services. This feature was originally requested in a context where the services belonged to several clients and thus used their own SonarQube instance.

If you already use the SonarQube plugin, check out the new release as there might be breaking changes that affect you: the backend was extracted to a separate plugin @backstage/plugin-sonarqube-backend.

Check out the PR and the plugin’s updated README.

BackstageCon NA: Register now + 20% off for KubeCon ticket

We’re thrilled for the first ever BackstageCon, taking place within KubeCon North America in Detroit. To attend, you must have a KubeCon ticket. Roadie is sponsoring the event, so we can help you shave 20% off of the KubeCon’s on-site ticket with this code: KCNA22ROAQW@ONSITE20

BackstageCon Banner

We hope to see you all there!


Before saying good bye, I want to welcome AppFolio to the community as the most recent adopter!

Talk to you next week!

Jorge L

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