Setting Up and Configuring Backstage

Calendar February 22, 2026
Platform-Engineering
Intermediate
Backstage-Administration, Catalog-Configuration, Template-Authoring, Plugin-Development
Backstage, Software-Catalog, Techdocs, Scaffolder, Plugins, Spotify, Developer-Portal
Backstage, Nodejs, Yarn, Docker, Github, Postgresql, Mkdocs

What Backstage Provides#

Backstage is an open-source developer portal originally built by Spotify, now a CNCF Incubating project. It serves as the single UI layer for an internal developer platform, unifying the service catalog, documentation, scaffolding templates, and plugin-based integrations behind one interface. It does not replace your tools — it provides a consistent frontend for discovering and interacting with them.

The core components:

  • Software Catalog: A registry of all services, libraries, APIs, and infrastructure components, populated from YAML descriptor files in your repositories.
  • TechDocs: Documentation-as-code powered by MkDocs, rendered directly in the Backstage UI alongside the service it describes.
  • Scaffolder: A template engine that creates new projects from predefined templates — repositories, CI pipelines, Kubernetes manifests, and all.
  • Plugins: Backstage’s extension mechanism. The community provides plugins for Kubernetes, ArgoCD, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, Terraform, and hundreds of other tools.

Installation#

Backstage requires Node.js 18+ and Yarn. Create a new Backstage app: