Onboarding new developers is hard. Spotify’s Backstage makes it easier to collect your team’s standards, processes, and development tools.

The Spotify engineering team recently released a new open-source tool called Backstage. While the initial release is still very much a work in progress, the tool has a lot of potential to fill a gap in developer tooling that many engineering teams may not even realize could help them.

What is Backstage?

Developed by the Spotify engineering team, Backstage is an open-source platform used for building developer portals. It is based on an internal tool Spotify uses to help organize development tools, documentation, and processes that new developers need to be aware of when developing a new app or API.

Simply put, Backstage helps you build developer productivity tools. The idea behind Backstage is that it helps reduce the cognitive load on a new developer by pulling together commonly required resources into one browser-based user interface.

Think about all the things you need to familiarize yourself with when you start developing something for a new organization. Is there a standard set of design patterns, frameworks, and programming languages that you are expected to use? Where can you find documentation about the organization’s APIs that you may need to consume? How and where can or should you deploy your solution?

You can help your developers answer these types of questions by building your own custom instance of Backstage, using the growing library of existing plugins or building your own plugins.

Note: Keep in mind that Backstage is still very new. In fact, the initial alpha version was released on 16 March 2020. Don’t expect a full ecosystem of plugins just yet. Do, however, expect a clean solution, fresh UI, thoughtful documentation, and a potential for something great.

Some of the examples in this article could become stale rather quickly, so always refer to the official documentation when in doubt.

Backstage tech stack highlights

Before we get hands-on with Backstage, let’s look at a few tools and frameworks that are fundamental to the Backstage implementation.

• Node.js: Backstage is a web frontend that is designed to run on Node.js, at least at development time. Backstage currently requires Node 12; I had mixed results running on Node 14
• TypeScript: Backstage is mostly written in TypeScript, though you can code in pure JavaScript if you so choose
• React: The frontend code is written using React. React components play a fundamental role in Backstage’s plugin architecture. Plugins are essentially individually packaged React components
• Yarn and Lerna: These two JavaScript tools go hand in hand. An alternative to npm, the Yarn package manager adds a few extra capabilities that enable Backstage’s monorepo structure. Similarly, Lerna also helps enable a monorepo structure. More on this shortly

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