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Call Existing API

This article describes the various options that Backstage frontend plugins have, in communicating with service APIs that already exist. Each section below describes a possible choice, and the circumstances under which it fits.

In these examples, we will be ultimately requesting data from the fictional FrobsCo API.

Issuing Requests Directly​

The most basic choice available is to issue requests directly from the plugin frontend code to the FrobsCo API, using for example fetch or a support library such as axios.

Example:

// Inside your component
fetch('https://api.frobsco.com/v1/list')
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(payload => setFrobs(payload as Frob[]));

Internally at Spotify, this has not been a very common choice. Third party APIs are sometimes accessed like this. Just a handful of internal APIs also went through the trouble of exposing themselves in a way that is useful directly from a browser, but even then, often not from the public internet but only supporting users that are already on the company VPN.

This can be used when:

  • The API already does/exposes exactly what you need.
  • The request/response patterns of the API match real world usage needs in Backstage frontend plugins. For example, if the end use case is to show a small summary in Backstage, but the only available API endpoint gives a 30 megabyte blob with large amounts of redundant information, it would hurt the end user experience. Particularly on mobile. The same goes for cases where you want to show many individual pieces of information: if a common use case is to show large tables where one API request per cell is necessary, the browser will quickly become swamped and you may want to consider performing aggregation elsewhere instead.
  • The API can maintain interactive request/response times at your required peak request rates. The end user experience will be degraded if they spend a lot of time waiting for the data to arrive.
  • The API endpoint is highly available. The browser does not have builtin facilities for load balancing, service discovery, retries, health checks, circuit breaking and similar. If the endpoint is occasionally down even for short periods of time (e.g. during deploys), end users will quickly notice.
  • The API is exposed over HTTPS (not just HTTP), and properly handles CORS. These are requirements that the user's browser will impose for security reasons, and the requests will be rejected otherwise.
  • The API endpoint is easily reachable, in terms of network conditions, by end users. This may be particularly relevant if your end users are outside of your perimeter.
  • The requests do not require secrets to be passed. This limitation does not apply to OAuth tokens, which the frontend can negotiate and make proper use of.

Using The Backstage Proxy​

Backstage has an optional proxy plugin for the backend, that can be used to easily add proxy routes to downstream APIs.

Example:

# In app-config.yaml
proxy:
  '/frobs': http://api.frobsco.com/v1
// Inside your component
const backendUrl = config.getString('backend.baseUrl');
fetch(`${backendUrl}/api/proxy/frobs/list`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(payload => setFrobs(payload as Frob[]));

The proxy is powered by the http-proxy-middleware package. See Proxying for a full description of its configuration options.

Internally at Spotify, the proxy option has been the overwhelmingly most popular choice for plugin makers. Since we have DNS-based service discovery in place and a microservices framework that made it trivial to expose plain HTTP, it has been a matter of just adding a few lines of Backstage config to get the benefit of being easily and robustly reachable from users' web browsers as well.

This may be used instead of direct requests, when:

  • You need to perform HTTPS termination and/or CORS handling, because the API itself is not supplying those.
  • You need to inject a simple static secret into the requests, e.g. an Authorization header that gets added to the request headers.
  • You want to make use of other proxy facilities, such as retries, failover, health checks, routing, request logging, rewrites, etc.
  • You already have the Backstage backend itself exposed through your perimeter and find it practical to have only one entry point to deal with, governing ingress with just the Backstage config.

Creating a Backstage Backend Plugin​

Much like the Backstage frontend, the Backstage backend also has a plugin system. The above mentioned proxy is actually one such plugin. If you were in need of a more involved integration than just direct access to the FrobsCo API, or if you needed to hold state, you may want to make such a plugin.

Example:

// Inside your component
const backendUrl = config.getString('backend.baseUrl');
fetch(`${backendUrl}/frobs-aggregator/summary`)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(payload => setSummary(payload as FrobSummary));
// Inside a new frobs-aggregator backend plugin
router.use('/summary', async (req, res) => {
  const agg = await Promise.all([
    fetch('https://api.frobsco.com/v1/list'),
    fetch('http://flerps.partnercompany.com:8080/flerp-batch'),
    database.currentThunk(),
  ]).then(async ([frobs, flerps, thunk]) => {
    return computeAggregate(await frobs.json(), await flerps.json(), thunk);
  });
  res.status(200).json(agg);
});

For a more detailed example, see the user-settings plugin backend that stores some state in a database and surfaces an API for the frontend plugin to use.

Internally at Spotify, this has been a fairly popular choice for different reasons. Commonly, the backend has been used as a caching and data massaging layer for slow APIs or APIs whose request/response shapes or speeds were not acceptable for direct use by frontends. For example, this has made it possible to issue efficient batch queries from the frontend, e.g. in big lists or tables that want to resolve a lot of sparse data from the larger list that an underlying service supplies.

This may be used instead of the above, when:

  • You need to perform complex model conversion, or protocol translation beyond what the proxy handles.
  • You want to perform aggregations or summaries on the backend instead of on the frontend.
  • You want to enable batching or caching of slower or more unreliable APIs.
  • You need to maintain state for your plugin, perhaps using the builtin database support in the backend.
  • You need to inject secrets or in other ways negotiate with other parts of the API or other services in order to perform your work.
  • You want to enforce end user authentication / authorization for operations on behalf of the API, have session handling, or similar.

There is a balance to strike regarding when to make an entirely separate backend for a purpose, and when to make a Backstage backend plugin that adapts something that already exists. General advice is not easy to give, but contact us on Discord if you have any questions, and we may be able to offer guidance.

Extending the GraphQL Model​

The extensible GraphQL backend layer is not built yet. This section will be expanded when that happens. Stay tuned!