How to create plugins with Backstage
Prerequisites
- We expect that you have finished the create-app golden path.
Scenario
You have an awesome idea to create a todo list tracker in your Backstage instance at an upcoming company hackathon. Backstage is supposed to unify all of our information after all, it should track future tasks to complete as well!
Many of the great Backstage plugins started in a similar way, a developer noticed that others on their team or in the company were:
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Wasting time manually compiling spreadsheets filled with error-prone data
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Spending hours every week trying to find that one specific link from that one site
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A million other problems that impact developer flow or are just toil
And they decided to create a shared plugin in Backstage to solve that problem.
This guide will teach you how to deliver high-quality Backstage plugins with confidence. Both so you can impress everyone at the hackathon and set yourself up for success when you inevitably are asked to make your plugin production-ready.
Structure
To start, this guide will walk through creating a backend plugin. You'll get your feet wet working with an HTTP API, a database and the Backstage backend system. Then, we'll move to the frontend, where we'll show you how to create a new page that's visible to your Backstage users as well as how to call your API. Finally, we'll walk through some common integrations you may want to consider as you write plugins.