@backstage-community/plugin-linguist-backend

Linguist Backend

Welcome to the Linguist backend plugin! This plugin provides data for the Linguist frontend features.

Setup

The following sections will help you get the Linguist Backend plugin setup and running.

Up and Running

Here's how to get the backend up and running:

• First we need to add the @backstage-community/plugin-linguist-backend package to your backend:

  # From the Backstage root directory
  yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage-community/plugin-linguist-backend
  

• Then in your packages/backend/src/index.ts make the following changes:

    import { createBackend } from '@backstage/backend-defaults';
  
    const backend = createBackend();
  
    // ... other feature additions
  
  + backend.add(import('@backstage-community/plugin-linguist-backend'));
  
    backend.start();
  

• Then update your app-config.yaml with your desired options, more details in the Plugin Options section below, here's a basic example to get started:

  # ... other config
  
  linguist:
    schedule:
      frequency:
        minutes: 2
      timeout:
        minutes: 2
      initialDelay:
        seconds: 15
    age:
      days: 30
    batchSize: 2
    useSourceLocation: false
  # ... other config
  

• Now run yarn start-backend from the repo root

• Finally open http://localhost:7007/api/linguist/health in a browser and it should return {"status":"ok"}

Linguist Backend API

The linguist backend provides API documentation through OpenAPI. To view the OpenAPI spec for your backstage instance, consider installing @backstage/plugin-catalog-backend-module-backstage-openapi.

Plugin Options

The Linguist backend has various plugin options that you can provide in the app-config.yaml file that will allow you to configure various aspects of how it works. The following sections go into the details of these options

Batch Size

The Linguist backend is setup to process entities by acting as a queue where it will pull down all the applicable entities from the Catalog and add them to it's database (saving just the entityRef). Then it will grab the n oldest entities that have not been processed to determine their languages and process them. To control the batch size simply provide that to the app-config.yaml file like this:

# ... other config

linguist:
  batchSize: 2
# ... other config

Note: The default batch size is 20

Kind

The default setup only processes entities of kind ['API', 'Component', 'Template']. To control the kind that are processed add that in your app-config.yaml file like this:

# ... other config

linguist:
  kind: ['Component']
# ... other config

Refresh

The default setup will only generate the language breakdown for entities with the linguist annotation that have not been generated yet. If you want this process to also refresh the data you can do so by adding the age (as a HumanDuration) in your app-config.yaml file like this:

# ... other config

linguist:
  age: { days: 30 }
# ... other config

With the age setup like this if the language breakdown is older than 15 days it will get regenerated. It's recommended that if you choose to use this configuration to set it to a large value - 30, 90, or 180 - as this data generally does not change drastically.

Linguist JS options

The default setup will use the default linguist-js options, a full list of the available options can be found here. Here's a simple example of using this in your app-config.yaml file:

# ... other config

linguist:
  linguistJsOptions: { offline: true }
# ... other config

Use Source Location

You may wish to use the backstage.io/source-location annotation over using the backstage.io/linguist as you may not be able to quickly add that annotation to your Entities. To do this you'll just need to set the useSourceLocation boolean to true in your app-config.yaml file:

# ... other config

linguist:
  useSourceLocation: true
# ... other config

Note: This has the potential to cause a lot of processing, be very thoughtful about this before hand

Links

• Frontend part of the plugin
• The Backstage homepage