Backstage and Tanzu¶

Tanzu Application Platform includes Backstage as its GUI, as a central component for building a Internal Developer Portal.

With that reasoning, TAP's version of Backstage is named Tanzu Developer Portal.

Add Additional Backstage Plugins to TDP¶

Tanzu Developer Portal, or TDP, contains Backstage's default plugins and a few selected plugins that make sense for its use in TAP.

The Backstage community has a lot more plugins available.

Many plugins require you to change the Backstage sources yourself before you they work as expected.

This is complicated with the TDP, as you do not have access to this version of Backstage's source.

To make it possible to add either your own or any of the existing Backstage plugins, the TAP team created additional APIs inside Backstage.

This allows us to "wrap" a vanilla Backstage plugin and include it into the TDP via the Tanzu Developer Portal Configurator.

Which comes down to building an updated TDP container image with the wrapper plugins included via a configuration file.

This has been explored by community superstar VRabbi, who has created a public repository with many Backstage community plugins already wrapped and ready to use.

I wanted to explore this myself, so I folled the following (high over) steps:

1. Create a Backstage Frontend and a Backend plugin
   1. See Create a Backend Plugin
   2. See Create a Frontend Plugin
2. Wrap Backstage plugins for use in the TDP
3. Add Wrapped Plugins to the TDP