Search Basics

In this lesson, we’ll dive into Backstage’s powerful search capabilities. Backstage offers a single place for developers to discover everything—your service catalog, component documentation, and even external resources like Confluence or Stack Exchange. By configuring Backstage’s collators and search backends, you can tailor the search experience to fit your organization’s needs.

Unified Search Interface

Backstage’s built-in search lets you query across services, APIs, and docs—all from one place. Even if you’re not sure where something lives in your infrastructure, a quick search will surface the right component or guide.

Extending Search with Plugins

Beyond out-of-the-box catalog and docs indexing, you can add collators for external tools. Index your Confluence pages, Stack Exchange threads, or any web-based resource.

Search Engine Options

Backstage supports multiple search backends. By default, it uses Lunr, but you can also connect to Postgres or Elasticsearch.

Configuring What Gets Indexed

The collator system controls which resources are crawled and how often. Out of the box, Backstage includes collators for:

• Service Catalog
• Built-in documentation

You can define additional collators for Confluence, Stack Exchange, or any REST API. Schedule each collator independently—for example:

Adding Elasticsearch as Your Search Backend

If you need enterprise-grade search, switch from Lunr to Elasticsearch:

1. Install the Elasticsearch module

yarn --cwd packages/backend add @backstage/plugin-search-backend-module-elasticsearch

2. Register the Elasticsearch plugin in your backend

import { createBackend } from '@backstage/backend-app-api';

async function main() {
  const backend = createBackend();

  backend.add(
    await import('@backstage/plugin-search-backend'),
  );
  backend.add(
    await import('@backstage/plugin-search-backend-module-elasticsearch'),
  );

  await backend.start();
}

main().catch(console.error);

3. Configure the connection in app-config.yaml

search:
  elasticsearch:
    provider: opensearch
    node: http://0.0.0.0:9200
    auth:
      username: opensearch
      password: changeme

Links and References

• Backstage Documentation
• Kubernetes Basics
• Terraform Registry