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v1.42.0

These are the release notes for the v1.42.0 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​

The new Frontend System is Adoption Ready! 🎉​

We've been hard at work over the last few months stabilizing the APIs for the New Frontend System, and we're excited to announce that they're ready for prime time! With the release of version 1.42.0, we're officially encouraging all developers to start migrating their apps to the new system, along with all their plugins.

The New Frontend System is a major leap forward, offering a more powerful, flexible, and overall better development experience. By migrating, you’ll be able to take advantage of declarative integration of plugins and removing a large amount of code that’s used to configure your Backstage App. With plugins also migrating, there’s new extensibility patterns on the horizon that will allow you to customize Backstage even further than before.

We know that migrating can be a big undertaking, so we've made it as easy as possible. You can choose to migrate gradually, using a hybrid approach that combines the new and old systems, or you can start fresh with a brand new app using the --next flag.

Whatever path you choose, we've got you covered. Check out our comprehensive migration guide for step-by-step instructions, and don't hesitate to reach out to us on our repository or Discord if you need help.

Default bundler switched to Rspack​

The Backstage CLI has been updated to use Rspack as the bundler for frontend apps. It has been available behind the EXPERIMENTAL_RSPACK flag since the 1.32 release, but has now been switched to the default. The use of WebPack can be restored using the LEGACY_WEBPACK_BUILD flag, along with installing the necessary dependencies. See the changelog for @backstage/cli for more information.

Kubernetes Legacy Backend System Removal​

We’ve removed support for the legacy backend system, as well all of the deprecated exports for the last plugin in the main repository. With this cleanup, we say goodbye to the last occurrence of the old @backstage/backend-common in the repository!

There’s extensive documentation in the changelog for migrating to the latest version.

Please reach out if you have any issues!

Scaffolder is now powered by OpenAPI + more deprecations!​

The Scaffolder router and client are now generated by the OpenAPI tooling. One of the oldest PR’s that we had in the repository has been merged after a lot of hard work. Thanks to @solimant and @aramissennyeydd for their continued support throughout!

Also with this, there’s been a lot of types moved into @backstage/plugin-scaffolder-common which means that their original exports from -react have now been deprecated. Please check out the CHANGELOG for more details on the affected types.

Contributed by @solimant in #27771

Catalog performance improvements​

The catalog sometimes did more work than necessary because it was not taking into account that in some places, order doesn’t matter. So that got fixed! The upshot is that you may see in your monitoring that it performs less useless stitching after the upgrade. To achieve this it will have to do a short period of more work right after the upgrade before it converges. Just so you are aware.

Contributed by @drodil in #30859

Security Fixes​

This release also fixes the possibility of the scaffolder logging both redacted and plain text secrets when used as input to the fetch:template action.

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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