Backstage Playground

April 21, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

semantic-release: angular Release

Backstage Playground

This is a very minimalistic Backstage instance that can be used for testing or demoing Backstage.

Version history

Updating this to the latest dynatrace plugin version

Development

To start the app, run:

yarn install
yarn dev

You can start the back- and frontend separately by running yarn start-backend and yarn start.

Note that not all plugins are configured in the development configuration.

Deployment

This repository contains the source code for a simple Backstage demo application. This app is built into a container image that can be deployed to e.g. Kubernetes (see the official docs for more details).

In addition to that, it contains manifests for the most basic Kubernetes deployment possible (official docs). Those can be used to deploy this Backstage instance to your Kubernetes cluster.

Configuration

Software Catalog

The Software Catalog is configured to read from the examples directory if you are running a local instance. For the production instance those files will be ignored and Backstage will read from GitHub and/or GitLab.

GitHub Configuration

GitLab Configuration

You can also use multiple GitLab hosts, but you'll need to make sure to add a token for each instance to the Backstage secret.

Scaffolder (Software Templates)

The scaffolder is configured out of the box. You just need to create a template and register it in the Backstage UI. You can take a look at the example template and the official documentation for more details.

TechDocs

The TechDocs plugin is configured to build, store and read documentation locally. This means adding documentation should work out of the box. See the official docs for more information on how to create documentation.

Kubernetes

With the Kubernetes integration developers can view information about their deployments directly from within Backstage.

Configuration

The Kubernetes plugin is installed but not yet configured. See https://backstage.io/docs/features/kubernetes/configuration/

Usage

To display Kubernetes entities as part of an Backstage entity, you just need to set the corresponding annotation. See the official documentation for more details.

ArgoCD

The ArgoCD plugin shows information about ArgoCD applications.

Configuration

Usage

Add either the argocd/app-name or argocd/app-selector annotation to your catalog-info.yaml.

metadata:
  annotations:
    argocd/app-name: <your-app-name>
    argocd/app-selector: <app-selector>

Notifications

The local notifications plugin allows you to send and display notifications/messages in the Backstage playground instance.

Configuration

You don't need any changes in the Backstage configuration. Notifications are enabled and shown in the menu by default.

Usage

  • To create a notification, send a POST request to <your-backend-url>/api/notifications with this payload:
{
  "message": "Your notification", # The text of your notifications
  "channel": "team-1", # The channel to send the notification to. Don't use whitespaces.'
  "origin": "sender" # Where the notification is coming from
}
  • After sending a notification you should see it in the Backstage UI when navigating to "Notifications" in the menu.

Dynatrace

The Dynatrace plugin fetches information from Dynatrace.

Configuration

Usage

See docs