New logo and 7 product improvements

We’ve been focussed on small UX improvements and Bugfixes for the past week or two so the changes are coming thick and fast. Expect more of the same for the next few weeks.

Roadie has a new logo! Within a week, this will replace the Backstage logos found in the application. You may want to warn your teams so they are not surprised.

We are beginning our first major initiatives which will add extra non-Backstage features to Backstage, so we feel it is appropriate to start owning the brand a bit more.

A 3D cube with three slits in it and the word Roadie

We still plan to allow you to upload your own logos.

Catalog troubleshooting guide (docs)

Debugging catalog ingestion problems isn’t always easy. To help you and your end users, we’ve written a comprehensive troubleshooting guide.

It explains how to use the Locations Log to track down problems and how to deal with common errors.

Scaffolder template creation guide (docs)

This new guide covers the syntax and options available when writing scaffolder templates. Every available action is covered, along with explanations of the arguments they take.

There’s also a troubleshooting section we will build on to cover common problems.

Placeholder secrets (enhancement)

Sometimes you want to make an authenticated HTTP request to a third-party service as part of a scaffolder template or a frontend plugin. We’ve added a few placeholder secrets to the secrets page so you can do this.

New customer secrets placeholders

At some point we’ll make this page fully dynamic so you can create your own named secrets.

You can read about how to setup a proxy with these tokens in this guide.

You can now link directly to individual TechDocs documents from the sidebar inside Roadie. Previously this would break the application routing.

Prevent duplicate custom plugin cards (bugfix)

It was too easy to accidentally save empty and duplicate custom plugins in Roadie. This caused confusion for users who were writing their own plugins. This is now fixed.

Adding the catalog to the sidebar should not break the app (bugfix)

Adding a link to the catalog into the sidebar would previously render a broken white page for the user. It would also break the Home widget. This should no longer cause a problem.

Shortcut home page widget (feature)

We’re big fans of project management application Shortcut at Roadie. For our own day to day usage, we made a home page widget which shows the tickets currently assigned to the logged in user.

Shortcut home widget

This is currently undocumented but if you’ve added a plugin previously it should be self-evident.