Community Plugins
A centralized repository for community-developed plugins that extend the functionality of Backstage, the developer portal platform.
What is Community Plugins?
Backstage Community Plugins is a repository that hosts community-developed plugins for Backstage, an open-source developer portal platform. It provides a centralized location for plugin collaboration, standardized release workflows, and management tools, separating plugin maintenance from the core Backstage codebase. This enables the Backstage ecosystem to grow through shared contributions while maintaining organizational flexibility.
Backstage plugin developers, maintainers, and organizations using Backstage who want to extend its functionality with community-supported integrations for tools like GitHub, Jenkins, Sentry, and monitoring systems.
It offers a collaborative framework with established release processes and workspace management, reducing the overhead for plugin maintainers. Unlike self-hosting plugins individually, it leverages community knowledge and centralized tooling, making it easier to discover, contribute to, and maintain Backstage extensions.
Overview
Community plugins for Backstage
Use Cases
Best For
- Finding pre-built Backstage plugins for integrating third-party tools like GitHub Actions or Sentry
- Contributing Backstage plugins to a shared community repository
- Managing Backstage plugin releases with standardized workflows
- Migrating plugins from the core Backstage repository to a community-maintained space
- Organizing Backstage plugins into portable, topic-based workspaces
- Collaborating with other developers on Backstage plugin development
Not Ideal For
- Teams requiring full, independent control over plugin development and release cycles without community oversight
- Projects that depend on plugins tightly integrated with Backstage core functionality, which remain in the main repository
- Organizations needing proprietary or custom plugins that cannot be openly shared in a public community repository
Pros & Cons
Pros
Provides a single repository for community members to co-develop and maintain plugins, making it easier to discover and contribute to extensions, as shown by the extensive list of migrated plugins like GitHub Actions and Sentry.
Offers consistent processes for changeset management and versioning, reducing maintenance overhead for plugin owners, as detailed in the Community Plugins Workflow section with isolated releases per workspace.
Groups plugins into topic-based workspaces that can be moved to separate repositories, offering flexibility in management, as highlighted in the workspace organization feature for plugins like catalog or kubernetes.
Hosts plugins migrated from the core Backstage repository, ensuring ongoing maintenance for popular integrations, with a documented list including Sentry and SonarQube.
Cons
Contributing plugins requires adhering to standardized guidelines and release processes, which can limit flexibility for maintainers who prefer independent development cycles, as acknowledged in the README's section on self-hosting options.
Plugin quality and updates rely on active community participation, which may lead to inconsistent support or stale plugins over time, given the collaborative nature without centralized backing for all contributions.
Since key Backstage plugins remain in the core repository, users might need to manage dependencies across multiple sources, potentially complicating integration and updates.
Frequently Asked Questions
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