backstage VS Gitea

apiVersion: scaffolder.backstage.io/v1beta3 # https://backstage.io/docs/features/software-catalog/descriptor-format#kind-template kind: Template metadata: name: sample-btpsubaccount-remote-template title: Remote Template for SAP BTP Subaccount Setup description: A remote template that creates a basic SAP BTP Subaccount setup tags: - sap - btp - basic - javascript spec: owner: user:guest type: service

Backstage is an open-source platform developed by Spotify for managing the entire lifecycle of developer infrastructure, including services, APIs, documentation, and more. Backstage streamlines the development process through its centralized and customizable platform, offering a unified dashboard that consolidates information on projects, services, and infrastructure. Acting as a service catalog enhances transparency by allowing teams to document and discover internal services easily. Backstage's extensible architecture supports a robust plugin ecosystem, enabling teams to tailor the platform to their specific workflows and preferences. The platform promotes collaboration, accelerates onboarding through standardized documentation, and integrates seamlessly with various DevOps tools.

It’s also well understood that having a k8s cluster is not enough to make developers able to host their services - you need a devops team to work with them, using tools like delivery pipelines, Helm, kustomize, infra as code, service mesh, ingress, secrets management, key management - the list goes on! Developer Portals like Backstage, Port and Cortex have started to emerge to help manage some of this complexity.

We use Confluence and markdown files in GitHub. I think we are moving a lot of our docs to Backstage [0] soon.

One process that ends up being really valuable for documentation purposes is our "Architecture Review Documents". This is a standard document that team leads fill out before starting work on a new Saga/Epic/Feature/whatever. It includes the scope and business value of a new feature or large block of work, high level technical architecture of implementation, the impact on existing database schemas and service APIs, etc. This document is presented in a meeting with technical leadership in our organization who deep dive on the topic and explore potential pitfalls in the plan.

The document and recording of that meeting live on forever, and this information is very useful when getting acquainted with a certain part of our product/codebase. You are able to read and hear clearly the intention of a certain service or module, and you can identify several relevant points of contact to ask questions to.

[0] https://backstage.io/

Check the Backstage repo on GitHub

Backstage - An open platform for building developer portals. [Internal Developer Portal]

So you've just bought a new platform tool? Maybe it's Hashicorp Vault? Snyk? Backstage? You’re excited about all of the developer experience, security and other benefits you're about to unleash on your company—right? But wait…

The idea is to have a central point where people can find standards, documentation, and designs. The team can do this with a specialized tool like Backstage, Confluence, Github, Google Docs, or some internal implementation. The software is not the most important thing here, but having an easy way to find what is needed for the person to be more productive.

Create a system service. Download the file and save it to /etc/systemd/system/ or view the raw file in a browser and replace the URL with the version of Gitea you installed. You can find the list on https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/release/v1.22/contrib/systemd/gitea.service:

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

Same [1]. Zoom being outsourced to the implementing platform is one major pain-point. That example from us has grown in size.

We are clearly using the wrong tool for a diagram of this complexity, but the practicality of seeing commit changes in the diff, what property was changed by whom and instantly having the visual feedback in the Pull Request is just way too useful to use a "proper" tool.

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/25803

It's a tangent, but I think it's interesting that Gitea started trying to self host in Feb 2017 (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029) and hasn't got there yet (based on how active the github issues/PR page are).

https://about.gitea.com/ offers me a "free cloud trial" and otherwise sounds very like other web front ends to git. So like github, except they don't trust it themselves.

In contract forgejo has "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub" written in big letters on the landing page. https://codeberg.org/forgejo is indeed self hosted.

Gitea is a versatile tool for creating and managing git-based repositories, streamlining Code Review to enhance code quality for users and businesses. It integrates a CI/CD system, Gitea Actions, compatible with GitHub Actions, allowing users to create workflows in YAML or use existing plugins. Gitea's project management features include issue tasks, labeling, and kanban boards for efficient management of requirements, features, and bugs. These tools integrate with branches, tags, milestones, assignments, time tracking, and dependencies to plan and track development progress. Furthermore, Gitea supports over 20 package management types, such as Cargo, Composer, NPM, and PyPI, catering to a wide range of public or private package management needs. This comprehensive suite of features makes Gitea a powerful platform for managing development projects and packages.

Golang has a ton of single binary websites out there. The two that come to mind off hand are Gogs/Gitea only because I contributed to them

https://github.com/gogs/gogs

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

My problem with Fossil is that it is a "one solution for all problems". Fossil packs all solutions together while the Git ecosystem provides several different solutions for each problem.

When you want to do things that Fossil is not meant to do, then you're in trouble. I have no idea on how to do CI/CD and DevOps with Fossil and how to integrate it with AWS/Azure/GCP.

I find that the whole ecosystem of Gitlab/Github and stand-alone alternatives like Gitea [1], Gogs [2], Notion, Jira and others is way more flexible and versatile.

[1] https://about.gitea.com/