Tame engineering sprawl with a developer portal — one place to find services, create components, read docs, and access tools.

Welcome to Backstage: Building Developer Portals.

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals: a single, unified place for engineers to find services, documentation, and tools — taming the sprawl of microservices and infrastructure. This free book teaches it from the ground up: the developer-experience problem and platform engineering, Backstage's architecture (a framework you build on, with a React frontend and Node.js backend), the Software Catalog (entities, ownership, relationships), Software Templates and golden paths, TechDocs (docs-as-code in the portal), the plugin ecosystem for integrating your tools, building and customizing your portal, adoption and organizational practices, and Backstage's place in the cloud-native ecosystem. Ten focused chapters with clear diagrams that show how to build a developer portal that genuinely improves developer experience at scale.

This title is part of the ShriIra library and is free to read in full, right here — our small contribution to making world-class knowledge easy to reach.

A note on reading it: open the Contents menu at the top of the reader to jump between chapters, use the Aa menu to set a comfortable text size, theme (light, sepia, or night), and single- or two-page layout. Your place is saved automatically, so you can always pick up where you left off.

We hope it serves you well.

— Shriira Press

Contents

1. Chapter 1 — What Backstage Is
2. Chapter 2 — Developer Experience and Platform Engineering
3. Chapter 3 — Architecture
4. Chapter 4 — The Software Catalog
5. Chapter 5 — Software Templates and Golden Paths
6. Chapter 6 — TechDocs and Documentation
7. Chapter 7 — Plugins and Integrating Tools
8. Chapter 8 — Building and Customizing Your Portal
9. Chapter 9 — Adoption and Organizational Practices
10. Chapter 10 — Backstage in the Ecosystem and in Practice