Project: Backstage (App Definition and Development / Application Definition & Image Build)
File: glossary.md

id: glossary title: Glossary description: List of terms, abbreviations, and phrases used in Backstage, together with their explanations. A that gives access to perform actions on behalf of a user. It will commonly have a short expiry time, and be limited to a set of . Part of the protocol, see for more information. Someone responsible for installing and maintaining a Backstage for an organization. A . An representing a schema that two use to communicate. See for more information. An installed instance of Backstage. An app can be local, intended for a single development group or individual developer, or organizational, for use by an entire enterprise. A type of used by confidential and public clients to get an . See for more details. An open source framework for creating and deploying , originally created at Spotify. Backstage is an incubation-stage open source project of the . . The actual framework that Backstage sit on. This spans both the frontend and the backend, and includes core functionality such as declarative integration, config reading, database management, and many more. A collection of . The output of the bundling process, which brings a collection of into a single collection of . The core Backstage plugin that handle ingestion and display of your organizations software products. An organization's portfolio of software products managed in Backstage. A set of technologies that "empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach." (). A foundation dedicated to the promotion and advancement of . The mission of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is "to make cloud native computing ubiquitous" (). CNCF is part of the . Cloud Native Computing Foundation. flow where the client receives an that is passed to the backend to be exchanged for an and possibly a . A transformer that takes streams of and outputs searchable texts. They're usually responsible for the data transformation and definition and collection process for specific . A software product that is managed in the Backstage . A component can be a service, website, library, data pipeline, or any other piece of software managed as a single project. See for more information. A mapping from a given entity to criteria a user must fulfill to perform an action on that entity. Examples include `isOwner`, `hasRole`, etc. A type of that allows for per-user evaluation of against a . See A volunteer who helps to improve an OSS product such as Backstage. This volunteer effort includes coding, testing, technical writing, user support, and other work. A . A new paradigm for Backstage frontend plugins, allowing definition in config files instead of hosting complete React pages. See . A transform stream that allows you to add additional information to . An executable or package file with all of the necessary information required to deploy the application at

Deployment artifacts can be hosted on . Someone who writes code and develops software. A defined as someone who uses a Backstage . Might or might not actually be a software developer. A centralized system comprising a user interface and database used to facilitate and document all the software projects within an organization. Backstage is both a developer portal and (by virtue of being based on plugins) a framework for creating developer portals. An abstract concept representing something that can be found by searching for it. A document can represent a software entity, a TechDocs page, etc. Documents are made up of metadata fields, at a minimum -- a title, text, and location (as in a URL). An area that relates systems or entities to a business unit. See for more information. What is cataloged in the Backstage Software Catalog. An entity is identified by a unique combination of , , and name. See for more information. Someone who assesses whether Backstage is a suitable solution for their organization. The only with a pre-deployment . A used to prove a user's identity, containing for example the user's email. Part of . An index is a collection of of a given type. A write stream of . Someone who develops one or more plugins that enable Backstage to interoperate with another software system. A . JSON Web Token. A popular JSON based token format that is commonly encrypted and/or signed, see for more details. Classification of an in the Backstage Software Catalog, for example service, database, and team. An open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. A core Backstage plugin enabling a service owner-focused view of Kubernetes resources. One of the within a . These package may or may not also be published to a . A single repository for a collection of related software projects, such as all projects belonging to an organization. A project layout that consists of multiple within a single project, where packages are able to have local dependencies on each other. Often enabled through tooling such as and An optional attribute that can be used to organize . A high level goal of a interacting with Backstage. Some goals of the administrator user role, for example, are to maintain an instance ("app") of Backstage; to add and update functionality via plugins; and to troubleshoot issues. Refers to: OAuth 2.0, a standard protocol for authorization. See . flow that results in both a refresh token and , where the refresh token has a long expiration or never expires, and can be used to request more access tokens in the future. This lets the user go "offline" with respect to the token issuer, but still be able to request more tokens at a later time without further direct interaction for the user. A layer on top of which standardises authentication. See for more details. Open source software. A package in the Node.js ecosystem, often published to a

A service that hosts . The most prominent example is . The declared role of a package, see . A core Backstage plugin and framework that allows restriction of actions to specific users. See for more information. A restriction on any action that a user can perform against a specific or set of resources. See for more details. Alternative term for a . A module in Backstage that adds a feature. All functionality outside of , even the core features, are implemented as plugins. A construct that takes in a Backstage user and a and returns a . A specific response to a user's request to perform an action on a list of . Can be either `Approve`, `Deny` or . A separate browser window opened on top of the previous one. A set of actions that accomplish a goal, usually as part of a . A procedure can be high-level, containing other procedures, or can be as simple as a single . An abstraction layer between a search engine and the backend. Allows for translation into queries against your search engine. A special token that an client can use to get a new when the latter expires. https://oauth.net/2/refresh-tokens/ An that represents a piece of physical or virtual infrastructure, for example a database, required by a component. See for more information. A representation of an object that a user interacts with and that can be permissioned. Not to be confused with . A predicate-based control that taps into a 's data. See . Known as . A string that describes a certain type of access that can be granted to a user using OAuth, usually in conjunction with . A Backstage plugin that provides a framework for searching a Backstage , including the and . A core feature of Backstage. Existing search technology that can take advantage of through its modular design. Lunr is the default search in Backstage Search. A Backstage plugin that provides a framework to keep track of ownership and metadata for any number and type of software . A core feature of Backstage. A Backstage plugin with which to create in Backstage. A core feature of Backstage. Also known as the scaffolder. A "skeleton" software project created and managed in the Backstage Software Templates tool. A system is a collection of that cooperate to perform a function. A system generally provides one or a few public APIs and consists of a handful of components, resources and private APIs. See for more information. A low-level step-by-step . A documentation solution that manages and generates a technical documentation from Markdown files stored with software component code. A core feature of Backstage. A string containing information. A purpose for which a interacts with Backstage. Related to : An objective is what the user wants to do; a use case is how the user does it. A class of Backstage user for purposes of analyzing . One of: evaluator; administrator; developer; integrator; and contributor.