Search Documentation
Backstage Search
What is it?
Backstage Search lets you find the right information you are looking for in the Backstage ecosystem.
Features
A federated, faceted search, searching across all entities registered in your Backstage instance.
A search that lets you plug in your own search engine of choice.
A standardized search API where you can choose to index other plugins data.
Project roadmap
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| Backstage Search v0 ✅ | Search Frontend letting you search through the entities of the software catalog. See v0 Use Cases. |
| Backstage Search V0.5 ✅ | Foundations for the architecture. |
| Backstage Search v1 ⌛ | Basic “out-of-the-box” in-memory indexing process of entities, and their metadata, registered to the Software Catalog. See v1 Use Cases. |
| Backstage Search v2 ⌛ | Search Backend responsible for the indexing process of entities, and their metadata, registered to the Software Catalog. See v2 Use Cases. |
| Backstage Search v3 ⌛ | Standardized Search API lets you index other plugins data to the search engine of choice. See v3 Use Cases. |
Use Cases
Backstage Search V.0
- As a software engineer I should be able to navigate to a search page and search for entities registered in the Software Catalog.
- As a software engineer I should be able to use the search input field in the sidebar to search for entities registered in the Software Catalog.
- As a software engineer I should be able to see the number of results my search returned.
- As a software engineer I should be able to filter on metadata (kind, lifecycle) when I’ve performed a search.
- As a software engineer I should be able to hide the filters if I don’t need to use them.
Backstage Search V.1
- As a software engineer I should be able to get a match of a search on all entity metadata (e.g. owner, name, description, kind).
- As an integrator I should not have to plug in any search engine, instead I can use the out of the box in-memory indexing process to index entities and their metadata registered in the Software Catalog.
Backstage Search V.2
- As an integrator I should be able to spin up an instance of ElasticSearch.
- As an integrator I should be able to define a ElasticSearch cluster in my app_config.yaml where my data gets indexed to.
more to come...
Backstage Search V.3
- As a contributor I should be able to integrate plugin data to the indexing process of Backstage Search by using the standardized API.
- As a software engineer I should be able to search for all content (for example, entities, metadata, documentation) in Backstage search.
more to come...
Search Engines Supported
See Backstage Search Architecture to get an overview of how the search engines are used.
| Search Engine | Support Status |
|---|---|
| Basic (lunr) | Not yet ❌ |
| ElasticSearch | Not yet ❌ |
Reach out to us if you want to chat about support for more search engines.
Tech Stack
| Stack | Location |
|---|---|
| Frontend Plugin | @backstage/plugin-search |
| Backend Plugin | @backstage/plugin-search-backend |
| Indexer Plugin | @backstage/plugin-search-backend-node |
| Common Code | @backstage/search-common |
Get Involved
For any questions, feedback, or to help move search forward, reach out to us in
the #search channel of our
Discord chatroom.