Backstage Community Plugins
What is the community-plugins repository?
The community-plugins
repository is a place where members of the community can host a plugin or a set of plugins. The goal of community-plugins is to reduce the amount of pull requests and issues from backstage/backstage
, which has become too big with the time.
By creating community-plugins we give to plugin maintainers all the tools to easily manage and publish their plugins.
Contributing a plugin
Plugins created by the wider Backstage community are welcome to be published in the community-plugins
repository. When you contribute a plugin to this repository, you agree to follow specific guidelines, including a standardized release process. This allows plugin owners to leverage established processes and the collective knowledge of the Backstage community-plugins
community.
For those seeking full autonomy over their plugin's development and release lifecycle, self-hosting remains a supported and valid option. The decision to either contribute to the community repository or self-host will depend on whether you prefer to manage the development of the plugin independently or develop the plugin as part of a community-driven process. Both approaches are valued within the Backstage ecosystem and contribute to its growth.
Plugins that are key to the functionality and operation of Backstage will continue to reside in the backstage/backstage
repository - ensuring the central components that underpin the platform are centrally managed and maintained.
To get started with creating a new plugin, follow the guidance in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Community Plugins Workflow
The community-plugins
repository is formed by a set of workspaces. A workspace holds a plugin or a set of plugins based on a specific topic. For example, catalog, kubernetes, and TechDocs can be referred to as workspaces.
Each plugin belongs to a workspace and workspaces are portable enough to be moved to its own repository if desired. Each plugin workspace has its own changesets and isolated releases.
Plugins depend on other plugins via regular npm dependencies, regardless of whether the other plugins are core plugins, other plugins within the repository, or external plugins.
Although the community repository isn't technically a yarn workspace", it functions as a repository with multiple yarn workspaces, with each workspace possessing its unique .changesets
directory.
Whenever a new changeset is introduced, a fresh "Version packages ($workspace_name)" PR is produced. Merging a Version packages PR will trigger the release of all the plugins in the workspaces (provided changesets have been added), and also update the CHANGELOG
files.
Plugins migrated from backstage/backstage
A number of plugins that originally resided in backstage/backstage
monorepo have moved to this backstage/community-plugins
repository.
List of migrated plugins
adr
airbreak
allure
analytics
apache-airflow
apollo-explorer
azure-devops
azure-sites
badges
bazaar
bitrise
cicd-statistics
cloudbuild
code-climate
code-coverage
codescene
cost-insights
dynatrace
entity-feedback
entity-validation
example-todo-list
explore
firehydrant
fossa
gcalendar
gcp-projects
git-release-manager
github-actions
github-deployments
github-issues
github-pull-requests-board
gitops-profiles
gocd
graphiql
graphql-voyager
ilert
jenkins
kafka
lighthouse
microsoft-calendar
newrelic
newrelic-dashboard
octopus-deploy
opencost
periskop
playlist
puppetdb
rollbar
sentry
shortcuts
sonarqube
splunk
stack-overflow
stackstorm
tech-insights
tech-radar
todo
vault
xcmetrics
Migration process
The migration of plugins from the backstage/backstage
monorepo to the community-plugins
repository was automated under the community-cli
tool.
You provide it with a path to the monorepo
which should be cloned locally, and a plugin ID. It will then create a new workspace in the community-plugins
repository with all of the plugins and modules that surround that workspace. For instance, if I use the todo
plugin as an ID, It will automatically move over @backstage/plugin-todo
as well as @backstage/plugin-todo-backend
and any other -common
, -node
or -modules
that are related.
Once the code is copied over, the npm scopes and all code references are updated to reflect the new scopes of @backstage-community/plugin-*
, and a changeset is created for the package to be published. The versions are kept the same for now, but the resulting changeset will publish the next version along, so if the package released at 1.25.0
was 0.10.0
then the new version will be @backstage-community/plugin-todo
0.10.1
.
There is a commit that is created in the monorepo
on either a specified branch as --branch
or on a new branch that is created for the migration. In this commit is a deprecation and a changeset for this package to go out, so 0.10.1
in @backstage/plugin-todo
will be marked as deprecated and replaced with @backstage-community/plugin-todo
as the same version.