The community-plugins repository is a place where members of the community can host a plugin or a set of plugins. The goal of community-plugins is to reduce the amount of pull requests and issues from backstage/backstage, which has become too big with the time.
By creating community-plugins we give to plugin maintainers all the tools to easily manage and publish their plugins.
Plugins created by the wider Backstage community are welcome to be published in the community-plugins repository. When you contribute a plugin to this repository, you agree to follow specific guidelines, including a standardized release process. This allows plugin owners to leverage established processes and the collective knowledge of the Backstage community-plugins community.
For those seeking full autonomy over their plugin's development and release lifecycle, self-hosting remains a supported and valid option. The decision to either contribute to the community repository or self-host will depend on whether you prefer to manage the development of the plugin independently or develop the plugin as part of a community-driven process. Both approaches are valued within the Backstage ecosystem and contribute to its growth.
Plugins that are key to the functionality and operation of Backstage will continue to reside in the backstage/backstage repository - ensuring the central components that underpin the platform are centrally managed and maintained.
community-plugins is formed by a set of workspaces. A workspace holds a plugin or a set of plugins based on a specific topic. For example, catalog, kubernetes, and TechDocs can be referred to as workspaces.
Each plugin belongs to a workspace and workspaces are portable enough to be moved to its own repo if desired.
Changesets have proven to be a reliable method for managing different versions of packages. Each plugin workspace has its own changesets and isolated releases. Plugins that depend on other plugins via regular NPM dependencies, regardless of whether the other plugins are core plugins, other plugins within the community repo, or external plugins. Although the community repository isn't technically a "yarn workspace", it functions as a repository with multiple sub yarn workspaces, with each workspace possessing its unique .changesets directory.
Whenever a new changeset is introduced, a fresh "Version packages ($workspace_name)" PR is produced. Merging a Version packages PR will trigger the release of all the plugins in the workspaces (provided changesets have been added), and also update the CHANGELOG files.
$ yarn create-workspaceThe migration of plugins from the backstage/backstage monorepo to the community-plugins repository has been automated under the community-cli tool.
You provide it with a path to the monorepo which should be cloned locally, and a plugin ID. It will then create a new workspace in the community-plugins repository with all of the plugins and modules that surround that workspace. For instance, if I use the todo plugin as an ID, It will automatically move over @backstage/plugin-todo as well as @backstage/plugin-todo-backend and any other -common, -node or -modules that are related.
Once the code is copied over, the npm scopes and all code references are updated to reflect the new scopes of @backstage-community/plugin-*, and a changeset is created for the package to be published. The versions are kept the same for now, but the resulting changeset will publish the next version along, so if the package released at 1.25.0 was 0.10.0 then the new version will be @backstage-community/plugin-todo 0.10.1.
There is a commit that is created in the monorepo on either a specified branch as --branch or on a new branch that is created for the migration. In this commit is a deprecation and a changeset for this package to go out, so 0.10.1 in @backstage/plugin-todo will be marked as deprecated and replaced with @backstage-community/plugin-todo as the same version.
Looking through the monorepo we can expect the following workspaces:
adrairbreakallureanalyticsapache-airflowapollo-explorerazure-devopsazure-sitesbadgesbazaarbitrisecicd-statisticscloudbuildcode-climatecode-coveragecodescenecost-insightsdynatraceentity-feedbackentity-validationexample-todo-listexplorefirehydrantfossagcalendargcp-projectsgit-release-managergithub-actionsgithub-deploymentsgithub-issuesgithub-pull-requests-boardgitops-profilesgocdgraphiqlgraphql-voyagerilertjenkinskafkalighthousemicrosoft-calendarnewrelicnewrelic-dashboardoctopus-deployopencostperiskopplaylistpuppetdbrollbarsentryshortcutssonarqubesplunkstack-overflowstackstormtech-insightstech-radartodovaultxcmetrics
Of course, there could be simplifcations to this workspace list and some workspaces will be merged into one, like for example the github- workspaces could become one github workspace instead, but for the inital migration, we will keep them separate.