The Stack Overflow for Teams plugins for Backstage integrate your private knowledge solution with your Backstage instance. These plugins provide seamless access to Stack Overflow Teams' most relevant data, allowing you to display the top users, top tags, and top questions directly within Backstage. Additionally, it indexes all the questions from a Stack Overflow instance and integrates them into Backstage search, providing enhanced discoverability.
These plugins also allow you to securely create Stack Overflow for Teams questions from Backstage itself.
Displays the top users and tags from your Stack Overflow instance, giving you insights into the most active contributors and trending topics.
Retrieves all the questions from your Stack Overflow instance and indexes them into Backstage search. This makes it easier to search and discover questions across your organization.
A centralized hub within Backstage that showcases the top questions. The hub also allows you to filter questions like you would on Stack Overflow.
One of the most exciting features of this plugin is the ability to securely create questions on your Stack Overflow instance directly from Backstage using OAuth. The authentication process is secure, ensuring that only authorized users can post questions, and it is designed to seamlessly integrate with Backstage.
If you’d like to quickly see how this integration works without setting up your own Backstage instance, you can use my Docker image:
estoesmoises/stackoverflow-backstage-demo:latest
This image runs a Backstage instance pre-configured with the Stack Overflow for Teams plugin. You just need to pass a few environment variables when starting the container to connect it to your Stack Overflow for Teams instance.
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
STACK_OVERFLOW_INSTANCE_URL |
The base URL of your Stack Overflow for Teams (Enterprise) instance. |
STACK_OVERFLOW_API_ACCESS_TOKEN |
A read-only, no-expiry API access token generated for your Stack Overflow Enterprise instance. This token is used by the plugin's search collator to index questions into Backstage search. |
STACK_OVERFLOW_CLIENT_ID |
The OAuth Client ID from your Stack Overflow application. This is required to enable the secure question creation flow from within Backstage. |
STACK_OVERFLOW_REDIRECT_URI |
The redirect URI where Stack Overflow should send users after completing the OAuth authentication flow. By default, this is {app.baseUrl}/stack-overflow-teams. For local development, you can use a redirect service like http://redirectmeto.com/http://localhost:7007/stack-overflow-teams. |
Once you have those values, run:
docker run -p 7007:7007 \
-e STACK_OVERFLOW_INSTANCE_URL=https://support-autotest.stackenterprise.co \
-e STACK_OVERFLOW_API_ACCESS_TOKEN='CasdasdasdaDQyrqdfQ))' \
-e STACK_OVERFLOW_CLIENT_ID=19 \
-e STACK_OVERFLOW_REDIRECT_URI=http://redirectmeto.com/http://localhost:7007/stack-overflow-teams \
estoesmoises/stackoverflow-backstage-demo:latestFollow these steps to install and run the plugin locally:
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Clone the repository
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Navigate into the project directory:
cd backstage-stackoverflow -
Install dependencies:
yarn install
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The installation will scaffold the Backstage application and include the necessary plugins.
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The plugins this project aims to develop are located in the
/pluginsfolder. Changes to the code will usually trigger a hot reload. If not, you can restart the Backstage application. -
To start the Backstage application, run:
yarn dev
Feel free to fork this repository and submit pull requests. Contributions, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome!