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Backstage

Open-source IDP — unified developer portal with service catalog and self-service scaffolding.

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Developer Portals
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Overview

Backstage is an open-source Internal Developer Platform (IDP) framework built by Spotify, providing a unified developer portal with a service catalog, software templates, TechDocs, and a plugin ecosystem for self-service infrastructure.

Key Features

  • Software Catalog — single source of truth for all services, APIs, and infrastructure components
  • Software Templates for self-service scaffolding of new services with golden paths
  • TechDocs for docs-as-code with auto-generated documentation sites
  • Plugin ecosystem with 200+ community plugins for CI/CD, monitoring, and cloud
  • Search across catalog, docs, and APIs from a single interface
  • CNCF Incubating project with active governance and large community

Real-World Workflows

Build an Internal Developer Portal

  1. 1Deploy Backstage using the create-app CLI and configure GitHub auth
  2. 2Register existing services in the catalog using catalog-info.yaml files
  3. 3Create Software Templates for your team's golden path (React service, Go API)
  4. 4Add plugins for PagerDuty, Datadog, and ArgoCD to surface context in one place

Enforce engineering standards at scale

  1. 1Define Software Templates with pre-configured linting, CI, and security scanning
  2. 2Developers scaffold new services via Backstage — opinionated by default
  3. 3Track adoption of standards via the catalog's system ownership graph
  4. 4Use TechADRs and TechDocs to document and surface architectural decisions

Getting Started

# Create a new Backstage app
npx @backstage/create-app@latest
cd my-backstage-app

# Start the development server
yarn dev

# Open at http://localhost:3000

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