PlatformEngr® Backstage plugins course

See the end result · about 20 minutes

A production-readiness plugin: a preview of where the course takes you

Run the finished portal with the readiness plugin on your laptop: scores for every component, stored and refreshed on a schedule, a card on each component page, checks added by another team, and permissions on who may evaluate.

This is a preview, not the first step. It runs the finished plugins with few explanations, so you can see where you are heading. To learn it, start the full course: it builds every package from yarn new and explains every piece.

This preview

The finished plugins, run from the reference repo at tag course-2-done. Commands to copy, few explanations.

The full course

10 modules: a backend plugin, database, config and scheduler, tests, an extension point, the frontend system, a utility API, entity cards, permissions and a capstone.

Your setup

Every command below uses these values. They stay in this browser and are shared with the full course. Needs Node.js 22 or 24, Yarn, Docker, gh and jq.

    What just happened

    scheduler (every 30 min) ──> catalog ──> checks ──> readiness_scorecards (Postgres) modules (api, ownership) ──(extension point)──> extra checks entity page ──> card (useEntity + readinessApi) ──> /api/readiness/scorecards/... Evaluate now ──> permission policy (platform only) ──> POST /api/readiness/evaluate

    The full course builds this properly, one package at a time, as the platform team and as team-checkout. The reference repo has the finished plugins in portal/plugins.