Investigate integration with Backstage

[dabeeeenster]

It would be nice to have a plugin for Backstage so that people can see their flags directly in Backstage.

There is a Harness plugin that would be a good starting point.

There is discussion about building out a generic flag plugin within Backstage here: https://github.com/backstage/community-plugins/issues/277

Instructions on building a plugin here https://backstage.io/docs/plugins/create-a-plugin

[emyller]

Extending on what @dabeeeenster has already shared above — thanks for the great context.

For starters like me: Backstage is a tool by Spotify that helps creating developer portals. It offers an ecosystem of plugins to add frontends to all kinds of external things, from documentation tools to AWS components, CI/CD, and why not feature flagging.

The journey in this project likely starts with running backstage-cli new --select plugin (or yarn new), which creates a micro React app from a boilerplate.

From there, it all depends on which functionalities we want to make available from the Backstage frontend. For example, the Harness plugin allows for listing and toggling feature flags globally — no segments or identities or multivariation, just plain booleans. The effort of this project mostly depends on defining the extent of functionalities to be implemented in this frontend.

If we want to extend the scope and favor community efforts, there's also a GitHub issue to standardize feature flag plugins in Backstage, which would lead to a new abstraction layer between Backstage and the Flagsmith plugin. OpenFeature was mentioned but the discussion didn't lead to any concrete plans. Not sure if it's worth pursuing right now.

[khvn26]

For more context, here's LaunchDarkly's Backstage plugin documentation and source: https://github.com/RoadieHQ/roadie-backstage-plugins/blob/launchdarkly/plugins/frontend/backstage-plugin-launchdarkly/README.md