Backstage - v1.14.0

These are the release notes for the v1.14.0 release of Backstage.

A huge thanks to the whole team of maintainers and contributors as well as the amazing Backstage Community for their hard work in getting this release developed and done.

Highlights

This release has an important security fix, along with a lot of squashed bugs and exciting additions! Enjoy.

BREAKING: Tweaks to the OpenAPI tooling

There’s been further work made on the OpenAPI tooling! One of the changes is that the commands for this feature are grouped under a schema openapi subcommand. This lets us structure things a bit better for the future. The generated file now also has a .generated.ts extension, to more easily be able to keep it apart in linting and similar.

BREAKING: Kubernetes plugin log viewer and tweaks

There’s been some awesome additions made to the Kubernetes plugin, including the ability to show pod logs! To support this, some breaking changes were made in some of its interfaces. Check out #17120 for some details of what changed.

DEPRECATION: React 16

We are preparing for React 18, and as part of doing that, we are now officially deprecating support for React 16. Nothing will break for you just yet, but if you are still on React 16 your backstage-cli commands will start to show helpful warning messages guiding you to bump to version 17 wehn you can.

See #17752 for some details about this, and links to the relevant issues.

New plugin: DevTools

This plugin is focused on integrators rather than end users. It allows you to see useful information about your Backstage installation, such as what operating system and NodeJS version it’s running on, what Backstage and individual package versions you have, and more! This may serve as a foundation for adding even more ops focused features in the future.

Contributed by @awanlin in #17393

Migration to AWS-SDK version 3

There’s been work done under the hood to migrate AWS features over to using v3 of their client SDKs. While this should mostly go below the radar and ultimately work the same as it did before, do reach out to us if you encounter any problems that might be related to this migration.

There’s actually a minor interface breakage as part of this, where AwsIamKubernetesAuthTranslator has some methods removed, but that’s one which may not have a lot of use outside of the package.

Contributed by @aochsner, see PRs linked at the bottom of issue #16470

Persistent session store for the auth backend

For auth providers that use session storage, those sessions are now persisted in the auth backend database, instead of in local memory. This should make session handling work better across scaled auth backend instances.

Markdown Output Support for Software Templates

You can now output Markdown from the Software Template runs which can provide more data to the end user after a job has completed in the outputs section of scaffolder/next

Contributed by @voximity in #17641

Refactored Configuration Loading

The configuration loading system has been refactored to make it easier to extend the system with additional sources of configuration. See the initial PR and the @backstage/config-loader changelog for more details.

Catalog database performance tweaks

We found some hotspots in the catalog database operations, and streamlined them. Hopefully this should be noticeable in the form of slightly lower CPU and IOPS usage.

Security Fixes

A security flaw in the vm2 package used by the Scaffolder plugin was patched by our automated security processes in #17810. The fixed version of vm2 was already covered by the required version range of the Scaffolder plugin, so adopters are able to address this vulnerability separately without upgrading Backstage itself, as part of their regular security processes.

Upgrade path

We recommend that you keep your Backstage project up to date with this latest release. For more guidance on how to upgrade, check out the documentation for keeping Backstage updated.

Links and References

Below you can find a list of links and references to help you learn about and start using this new release.

• Backstage official website, documentation, and getting started guide
• GitHub repository
• Backstage's versioning and support policy
• Community Discord for discussions and support
• Changelog
• Backstage Demos, Blog, Roadmap and Plugins

Sign up for our newsletter if you want to be informed about what is happening in the world of Backstage.