Backstage Search

A flexible, extensible search across your whole Backstage ecosystem.

Development is ongoing. You can follow the progress and contribute at the Backstage Search Project Board or reach out to us in the #search Discord channel.

Getting started

Run yarn dev in the root directory, and then navigate to /search to check out the plugin.

Optional Settings

Configure the search query values via app-config.yaml to define how it behaves by default.

# app-config.yaml
search:
  query:
    pageLimit: 50

Acceptable values for pageLimit are 10, 25, 50 or 100.

NOTE: Currently this configuration only reflects the initial state of the Search React components. This means that it defines how it behaves when it is first loaded or reset.

Areas of Responsibility

This search plugin is primarily responsible for the following:

• Providing a <SearchPage /> routable extension.
• Exposing various search-related components (like <SearchModal />, <SidebarSearch />, etc), which can be composed by a Backstage App or by other Backstage Plugins to power search experiences of all kinds.

Don't forget, a lot of functionality is available in web libraries and backend plugins:

• @backstage/plugin-search-react, which is responsible for:
  • Exposing a <SearchContextProvider />, which manages search state and API communication with the Backstage backend.
  • Exposing the SearchApi and its corresponding ref.
  • Exposing reusable components, such as <SearchBar> and <SearchFilter>, etc.
• @backstage/plugin-search-backend-node, which is responsible for the search index management
• @backstage/plugin-search-backend, which is responsible for query processing