At FrontenderZ, we believe a world-class developer portal should be a perfect, high-fidelity mirror of your architectural reality. It’s the standard you should strive for, and it’s the key to unlocking the true promise of platform engineering: clarity, speed, and governance.
But for many organizations that have embraced both Nx and Backstage, there’s a critical visibility gap. You've adopted Backstage to bring order to your complex ecosystem and an Nx monorepo to standardize tooling. But out of the box, they don't talk to each other.
When you register your monorepo in Backstage, it sees one giant blob. It can't see the dozens of applications and libraries, it doesn't know who owns them, and it has no idea how they depend on each other. This gap is a huge missed opportunity to provide your developers with the clarity they deserve.
The Backstage community has a standard pattern for solving this, outlined in the "Split Monorepo" approach. It's a solid pattern that involves creating a catalog-info.yaml for every project.
But at enterprise scale, this manual process becomes a significant tax on developer productivity. It's a form of "digital drudgery" that is:
Tedious: Manually creating dozens or hundreds of boilerplate YAML files is not a high-value task.
Brittle: It's easy to forget to create a file for a new library or to update a dependency.
Stale: Over time, this manual catalog inevitably drifts from the reality of the codebase, eroding developer trust in the portal.
This is the exact kind of friction our Strategic Platform Assessment is designed to identify and eliminate.
We believe your Nx workspace - with its project graph and rich metadata - should be the single source of truth. Your developer portal should reflect that truth automatically.
Today, we're excited to release @frontenderz/backstage-insights, our open-source Nx plugin that automates this entire process.
Our plugin is a simple command-line tool that:
Scans your entire Nx project graph to discover every app and library.
Reads your project.json files to extract ownership and other metadata.
Understands the dependencies between your projects.
Generates a complete, interconnected, and valid set of catalog files for Backstage to ingest.
It turns a tedious, manual process into a single, reliable command:
npx nx generate-backstage-catalog
A command line tool is a great start, but true automation means making this a seamless, "hands-off" part of your engineering system. The command is designed to be automated in one of three common patterns:
The "Scheduled" Pattern (CI/CD): Run a nightly GitHub Action to generate the files and open a PR if changes are detected. This is a simple and reliable way to ensure your catalog is never more than 24 hours out of date.
The "Real-Time" Pattern (Git Hooks): Use a pre-commit hook to run the command before every commit, ensuring the catalog is always in perfect sync.
The "Event-Driven" Pattern (CI/CD): Integrate the command into your main CI pipeline to run on every merge to main, providing a clean audit trail.
We've designed the user experience to be as seamless as possible. You can go from a black box to a fully transparent catalog in under five minutes.
For the Practitioner:
You can find the package on NPM and the full source code on GitHub to get started immediately.
NPM Package: @frontenderz/backstage-insights (not yet there at the time of this writing)
GitHub Repository: frontenderz/frontenderz-nx-plugins
For the Leader:
Wondering how this fits into a broader platform strategy? This plugin solves a piece of the puzzle, but it's just one part of building a comprehensive frontend platform. To learn about our full, five-pillar approach to reducing developer friction and accelerating your time-to-market, download our free Architect's Guide to Frontend Platform Engineering.
This v0.1.0 release solves component and ownership discovery, but our vision is much bigger, with Backstage TechDocs integration coming next. This is a tool for the community, and we'd love to hear from you.