Backstage Temporary Development Guid📜

The Dev and Ops team is actively working on bringing backstage to the BB suite of apps. At this time these are the steps required to get the stage version of backstage up and running on your dev cluster.

NOTE: You will need access to the bigbang-staging projecet in Iron Bank

Local Environment📜

Important: verify you have enabled buildkit and build on your local machine.

See below steps for setting up local development:

Validate node version: node --version expected 20.18.x
Validate npm version: npm --version expected 10.8.x
Local docker and make commands available.

Due to the nature of building plugins into the image, we are required to build the backstage image, and then publish it in order to test it inside of k3d-dev. Current backstage version is pinned in backstage/backstage.json. The following are steps for building and publishing development and testing images.

Build📜

In the root directory, there is a Makefile. If you want to test your changes locally and directly, you can run make run. This will run backstage as a local app directly to your session, utilizing backstage/app-config.yaml as the config, and opening a window with your defaulted browser to backstage homepage.
If you want to build an image, you can run make docker-build-multi which will docker build the backstage/Dockerfile. See the bottom of Dockerfile for changes to which config is launched as the CMD for the image.

Publish📜

Upon image successfully building, you can validate it runs locally using docker run --rm -it -p 7007:7007 <image ID>, and visiting an incognito page at localhost:7007 (Incognito recommended due to caching). This will run the container with your built image to session, using backstage/app-config.yaml.

Once the dev image changes are validated, you can tag the image using the following: docker tag <image ID> registry1.dso.mil/bigbang-staging/backstage:<tag-name> Once tagged, run docker push registry1.dso.mil/bigbang-staging/backstage:<tag-name>. This will publish your tag to IB.

k3d📜

Upon publishing your development branch tag, you can modify your image tag override (below) at initial-start with the tag name and this will run your built image against bigbang.

Devbox📜

Devbox is a command-line tool that helps developers create consistent, isolated development environments by leveraging the Nix package manager. It simplifies the process of installing and managing dependencies across different projects, ensuring reproducible builds for every team member.

The project has a devbox config. This will ensure you have the specific version of the dependencies needed to build this project.

Installation instructions📜

Installation is straight forward. Run curl -fsSL https://get.jetify.com/devbox | bash if you are on MacOS/Linux. For other OS install instructions, refer to the documentation:

https://www.jetify.com/docs/devbox/installing_devbox/

NOTE: It is best practice to review any scripts you download from the internet before just blindly running them.

Usage📜

Once you have devbox installed, simply enter the directory where you have cloned backstage and run devbox shell. This will fire up devbox, which on first run will pull down the appropriate Nix packages and setup the development environment. From there the commands listed above like make run should function without the need to worry about development dependencies.