This changelog edition covers everything we’ve shipped in June 2023.

Catalog

Unregister manually added catalog entities

Entities which are manually added via the “Register an existing component” page (shown below) can now be unregistered from the catalog as you would expect. Previously, this type of unregistration failed, with no error message for the user.

GitHub deploy plugin

This open-source plugin is now available on all Roadie instances. Our docs explain how to add it.

Upgrade to Backstage 1.14

All instances are running this version since June 19th. Here’s the release notes.

Tech Insights

Visualisations

Tech Insights data sources now have a visualization panel which can be used to view aggregate results. For example, you could use Tech Insights to collect Dockerfile base image versions used across a number of repositories, and visualise them in a chart.

This visualisation shows the version of React being used in package.json files in a number of repositories.

Combined with the recently added “Export CSV” feature, Tech Insights reporting is much improved.

Bug fixes and docs improvements

• We’ve documented how to use the broker with Tech Insights to retrieve data from internal systems which are not exposed to the public internet. Check out the docs.
• Compound checks now calculate results correctly. Previously, if one of the checks had an error, the error would be swallowed, and the entire check would fail to return a valid result.
• Scorecards in the catalog now only show errors relevant to the entity being viewed.
• Checks can now be created with names that are numbers. Previously, this would crash the application.
• Editing the “has annotation” filter of an existing check used to break it and make it disappear from the list of checks. This is now fixed.

Scaffolder

Bug fixes and docs improvements

• We’ve documented how to pre-fill scaffolder forms with URL parameters. Useful if you’re linking to a scaffolder job and you want to pre-fill the inputs to reduce the work the end user has to do. Check out the docs.