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Set Up Backstage

By mohamed salah naija —
Set Up Backstage

Backstage is an open platform designed for companies to build developer portals for managing their software assets. Developing your portal using Backstage is a straightforward process. Simply create an app and configure it according to your requirements.

Table of Contents:

1 - Prerequisites and installation
2 - Create your Backstage App
3 - Run the Backstage app

1 - Prerequisites and installation :

In this section, we will cover the prerequisites and installation steps necessary to set up your environment for developing with Backstage

  • Curl or wget :
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install curl
#OR
sudo apt-get install wget
  • Node.js LTS version using NVM :
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | bash
nvm install 20
nvm use 20
nvm alias default 20
  • Yarn
npm install --global yarn
#To check the version 
yarn --version
  • Docker
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
docker --version
sudo systemctl start docker
  • Git
sudo apt-get install git-all

2 - Create your Backstage App

To install the Backstage Standalone app, we'll utilize npx, a tool that comes preinstalled with Node.js and allows you to run commands directly from npm or other registries. Before we proceed with running the command, let's discuss its purpose.

This command will generate a new directory containing a Backstage app. The wizard will prompt you for the app's name, which will be created as a subdirectory in your current working directory.

npx @backstage/create-app@latest

Inside that directory, all the necessary files and folder structures will be generated for running your application.

3 - Run the Backstage app


Your Backstage app is now fully installed and ready to run! To start the app, navigate to the application directory and use the yarn dev command. This command will launch both the frontend and backend as separate processes in the same window.

cd my-backstage-app # your app name
yarn install
yarn dev

There is a brief pause as the frontend initializes. Once the frontend is fully built, your browser window should open automatically.

Screenshot of the Backstage portal.

This tutorial has demonstrated how to deploy Backstage using the npx @backstage/create-app@latest command. This command generates a new directory containing your fresh Backstage app. The app is currently configured for development, utilizing an in-memory database and preloaded with demo data.