plugin-development.md

Plugin Development in Backstage

Backstage plugins provide features to a Backstage App.

Each plugin is treated as a self-contained web app and can include almost any type of content. Plugins all use a common set of platform APIs and reusable UI components. Plugins can fetch data from external sources using the regular browser APIs or by depending on external modules to do the work.

Developing guidelines

• Consider writing plugins in TypeScript.
• Plan the directory structure of your plugin so that it becomes easy to manage.
• Prefer using the Backstage components, otherwise go with Material-UI.
• Check out the shared Backstage APIs before building a new one.

Plugin concepts / API

Routing

Each plugin is responsible for registering its components to corresponding routes in the app.

The app will call the createPlugin method on each plugin, passing in a router object with a set of methods on it.

import { createPlugin, createRouteRef } from '@backstage/core';
import ExampleComponent from './components/ExampleComponent';

export const rootRouteRef = createRouteRef({
  path: '/new-plugin',
  title: 'New plugin',
});

export const plugin = createPlugin({
  id: 'new-plugin',
  register({ router }) {
    router.addRoute(rootRouteRef, ExampleComponent);
  },
});

router API

addRoute(
  target: RouteRef,
  Component: ComponentType<any>,
  options?: RouteOptions,
): void;

/**
 * @deprecated See the `addRoute` method
 */
registerRoute(
  path: RoutePath,
  Component: ComponentType<any>,
  options?: RouteOptions,
): void;