Using TechDocs

Introduction

The TechDocs feature of Roadie Backstage allows markdown files written alongside the code of your components to appear in Backstage as styled HTML documentation. Because this documentation is centralized in Backstage, it is more likely to be found and used by other people in your organization.

Adding documentation to a component

Under the hood, Backstage uses the popular MkDocs library to render documentation.

Step 1: Add the mkdocs configuration file

Create a file called mkdocs.yml in the root of a component you want to document in Backstage. Inside that YAML file, add the following content, replacing {component-name} with the human name of your component.

site_name: '{component-name}'

nav:
  - Home: index.md

plugins:
  - techdocs-core

# Uncomment to add extensions if desired
#markdown_extensions:
#  - markdown_inline_mermaid

Step 2: Add markdown documentation

Create a directory called docs in the root of your component. Inside that directory, create a file called index.md with some markdown content inside. No frontmatter is required.

This is the documentation.

Your component’s directory structure should now look something like this:

├── README.md
├── catalog-info.yaml
├── docs
│   └── index.md
├── mkdocs.yml
└── src
    └── // The code of your component

Ensure you publish this new content to GitHub.

Step 3: Update the YAML metadata

We can use the catalog-info.yaml file of our component to tell Backstage where to find the documentation.

To do this, add the backstage.io/techdocs-ref annotation to the list of annotations.

If your docs are in the root of the repo, as described above, you can set the techdocs annotation to this:

annotations:
  backstage.io/techdocs-ref: dir:.

If your docs are located elsewhere, you must explicitly point to them like this:

apiVersion: backstage.io/v1alpha1
kind: Component
metadata:
  name: sample-service
  description: # ...
  annotations:
    backstage.io/techdocs-ref: url:https://github.com/your-org/your-repo/tree/main
spec:
  type: service
  owner: engineering
  lifecycle: experimental

⚠️ The GitHub URL must be prefixed with url: or the documentation will not render in Backstage.

Step 4: Publish your documentation

Commit the changes made in steps 1 through 3 to your repository. Roadie Backstage will pick up the changes shortly after they are merged to the default branch.

Viewing documentation in Backstage

To view your documentation in Backstage, first find the service in your service catalog and click it to open the Overview page.

On the Overview page, click Docs in the tab bar. You should now see your documentation.

Customize graphs in TechDocs

In order to customize the look of the graphs you will need to use the Graphviz attributes. Setting different values for specific set of attributes will result in graph being rendered that way. For example, let’s say we want to change background color from white to lightblue in following graph:

which could be defined in TechDocs with following code:

{% dot attack_plan.svg
    digraph G {
        rankdir=LR
        Earth [peripheries=2]
        Mars
        Earth -> Mars
    }
%}

Adding ‘bgcolor’ attribute in the Graphviz code above (so its final form is):

{% dot attack_plan.svg
    digraph G {
        bgcolor="lightblue"
        rankdir=LR
        Earth [peripheries=2]
        Mars
        Earth -> Mars
    }
%}

will result in graph being rendered in lightblue color.

This way you can customize the graph adding or removing any attribute you want.

Using Mermaid Diagrams

Roadie supports using Mermaid JS to render diagrams. It must first be enabled in your mkdocs.yaml:

markdown_extensions:
  - markdown_inline_mermaid

Then you can add mermaid diagrams as follows:

```mermaid
%%{init: {'theme': 'forest'}}%%
graph LR
  A[Start] --> B{Error?};
  B -->|Yes| C[Hmm...];
  C --> D[Debug];
  D --> B;
  B ---->|No| E[Yay!];
```

Adding more docs

Let’s add a page called Local Development to our docs.

First create a markdown file called local-development.md inside the docs directory of our component. Add some content to it.

Next, edit mkdocs.yml to make it aware of the newly created documentation page.

site_name: 'sample-service'

nav:
  - Home: index.md
  - Local Development: local-development.md

plugins:
  - techdocs-core

Commit and merge these changes to the default branch of your repo on GitHub and Backstage will pick up the changes after a short period of time.

Handling Documentation Monorepos

If you need to have a place to store docs that are not related to a specific codebase or component, you may want to use a single repository to collect that meta documentation.

Nested file structures and sub-directories can be modeled using the Monorepo plugin for techdocs.

Add to your root mkdocs.yaml file.

plugins:
  - monorepo

Reference other mkdocs.yaml files in sub-directories using the !include syntax like so:

nav:
  - Intro: 'index.md'
  - Authentication: 'authentication.md'
  - API:
    - v1: '!include ./v1/mkdocs.yml'
    - v2: '!include ./v2/mkdocs.yml'

Next steps

If you use OpenAPI specs in your organization you can learn how to associate them with your components.