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v1.4.0

These are the release notes for the v1.4.0 release of Backstage.

A huge thanks to the whole team of maintainers and contributors as well as the amazing Backstage Community for the hard work in getting this release developed and done.

Highlights​

Search is V1!​

Backstage Search is now promoted to v1.0 with a stable Search API for plugin developers to add search to their plugins, and app integrators to expose that to their users.

No additional features are released as part of the major release as the maintainers of the search packages focused on the following for this release:

  • Bug fixes and clean up of deprecations.
  • Improved error handling for missing indices.
  • Separation of AWS Elastic and Open Elastic support.
  • Refactor the packages by moving reusable components from @backstage/plugin-search to @backstage/plugin-search-react.
  • Improved documentation including tutorials for how to Integrate Search into a plugin.

With moving to v1.0 we also recommend using Elasticsearch for production usage. Moving forward, the search maintainers will prioritize the Elasticsearch engine while we’ll rely on the community to maintain the Postgres engine.

Experimental Backend System Evolution​

This release adds the new @backstage/backend-app-api and @backstage/backend-plugin-api packages, both part of the evolution of the backend system. These packages are highly experimental and we do not recommend using them for any purpose, yet.

@backstage/cli Deprecation Removals​

The @backstage/cli had a large number of deprecated commands removed, for example, app:build is now gone and should be replaced with package build. For a full list of commands that were removed, see the changelog.

@backstage/plugin-auth-backend Deprecation Removals​

Many deprecated symbols have now been removed from @backstage/plugin-auth-backend, most notably the provider factories such as createGithubProvider have been removed, which should be replaced with providers.github.create. See the changelog for more details.

New module: @backstage/plugin-api-docs-module-protoc-gen-doc​

This is a new module for @backstage/plugin-api-docs that exports a widget implementation for rendering gRPC docs generated by protoc-gen-doc. Contributed by @kissmikijr #11923.

New module: @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-openapi​

This is a new module for @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend that exports a catalog processor which de-references $ref fields in OpenAPI definitions. Contributed by @mfrinnstrom #11645.

New plugin: @backstage/plugin-apollo-explorer​

A plugin to embed the Apollo Explorer inside your Backstage instance to run queries against GraphQL endpoints. Contributed by @unredundant #12600.

Security Fixes​

@backstage/plugin-scaffolder-backend, please upgrade to the latest version if you are using this module.

Upgrade path​

We recommend that you keep your Backstage project up to date with this latest release. For more guidance on how to upgrade, check out the documentation for keeping Backstage updated.

Below you can find a list of links and references to help you learn about and start using this new release.

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