We have released a new version of Backstage, which includes the new inspect entity function.

The changelog is here.

A little known fact is that many of the requests issued by the plugins used in Roadie Backstage go through the Backstage proxy. We preconfigured some proxies to support the HTTP methods required by each plugin.

These proxies can also be used in the scaffolder, but our users had no way to know that they exist.

As of today, we’ve made default proxies visible in the Roadie Backstage UI so you can get a sense of what is already set up. Visit /administration/settings/proxy to see the default proxies.

We realised that empty catalog pages didn’t do a great job of helping you to understand how to use the application. When you sign in for the first time, you see an empty catalog table, but no guidance on how to fill it. The same problem is found on the API Specs page and elsewhere.

We decided to make our own empty states which help you understand what the page is for, and link to documentation to get you started faster.

As we know, Backstage relies heavily on YAML files which act as the source of truth for your catalog. But what happens if you delete or move one of these files?

In the past, not much. The Backstage catalog would mark them as “orphanged” and leave them in place. You had the option to go through them and unregister them from the catalog, but it could be a laborious process if you needed to clean up many catalog entities at once.

We heard this loud and clear from our users, so today we have added garbage collection to Roadie.

Use the admin panel to decide the kinds of entities you want to be garbage collected and the frequency with which you want it to happen. Once saved, your Backstage catalog will automatically stay in sync with your GitHub YAMLS.

Use the Buildkite plugin to track build progress, debug builds and retrigger failed builds.

Documentation showing how to set up Buildkite in Roadie Backstage is available here.

From today, we have released an improvement to ensure that Backstage metadata files will be found and validated regardless of their name or location in the codebase.

Roadie’s GitHub app automatically checks your Backstage metadata YAML files for syntactic correctness. This helps you to catch problems which may prevent your components from showing up in Backstage.

These files are typically named catalog-info.yaml and are often located in the root of a repository. However, users using monorepos frequently have these catalog-info.yaml files distributed throughout the monorepo. In these cases, the GitHub app validator would fail to find or validate the files. This is no longer the case.

Today we have enabled the Tech Insights Scorecard. You can add it to a component page to see a couple of example checks that we have enabled on your behalf. We want to continue to build on this feature in the coming weeks. Please let us know if you have any comments on this feature.

We’ve released a recent version of Backstage: 2021-12-09

The main user facing changes are:

1. The Kubernetes plugin has been improved to show jobs and cronjobs.
2. The techdocs experience has improved read performance.

Ever been stuck waiting for a Component to re-import so you can see if you fixed that syntax error in you catalog-info.yaml?

We’ve been there. The locations log now has a manual refresh button so you can check for updates on your terms.

We have noticed that getting the catalog info file right is difficult. Small syntax errors can mean that the catalog-info.yaml file doesn’t appear in Backstage at all. This leads to frustrating hours lost to debugging.

From now on, pull requests which edit catalog-info.yaml files will be checked for errors before they make their way to Roadie Backstage. This will allow you to detect errors in your catalog file before they are even deployed.

We have noticed it is sometimes challenging to understand which card displays a specific error in the Overview tab.

Now the name of the card is clearly visible in edit mode to help you debug the problem.

We discovered that large monorepos would sometimes fail to import in to Roadie Backstage.

There were 2 problems:

1. Sufficiently large monorepos would hit a timeout while being analyzed for problems before import.
2. Monorepos could contain circular references in their Location metadata files, leading to timoouts during import.

These issues are now fixed.

We also published a blog post explaining how to work with monorepos in Backstage.

We’ve released a recent version of Backstage: 2021-11-12

The main user facing changes are:

1. The “View API” button on the “About” card for entities has been removed in favour of users navigating to the API tab directly.
2. The search modal is now available.

When the catalog-info.yaml metadata for a entity is deleted, it’s possible for the entity to end up in an “orphaned” stage in Backstage.

Backstage now warns you when this happens, and gives you a way to clean up the entity.

The Travis CI plugin lets you List Travis CI Builds and Retrigger builds from within Backstage.

Visit our Travis CI documentation to learn how to use it.

FireHydrant is an incident management tool with a variety of reliability management features including its own service catalog. Backstage components can be added to the FireHydrant service catalog.

The FireHydrant plugin is now available in Roadie. Visit our docs to learn how to use it.

We’ve also made the Catalog Graph plugin available from today. The Catalog Graph plugin shows relationships between entities in your catalog.