Backstage

Backstage 1.56 lets catalog filters express backend queries as predicates with operators like $any, $not, and $hasPrefix (requiring a catalog backend from 1.49+), and adds new CLI modules for catalog, scaffolder, and search with JSON output suited to CI pipelines. This release is breaking: filter predicates must now be objects at the root instead of primitives, the Atlassian usernameMatchingUserEntityName sign-in resolver has been removed in favor of email-based resolvers, and the incremental-ingestion plugin's mark table schema change (ref renamed to entity_ref) cannot be applied as a zero-downtime rolling upgrade.

Matters for: Teams running self-hosted Backstage catalogs with the incremental-ingestion plugin against a production database, and teams using Atlassian OAuth for sign-in, both of which must plan migrations or resolver changes before upgrading.

Backstage 1.55 introduces automatic scaffolder task recovery, letting crashed or timed-out tasks resume from the last completed step with retained secrets and persisted outputs, provided actions are idempotent and a workspace provider module is installed. This release also removes deprecated catalog relation compatibility, CodeOwnersProcessor, and AnnotateScmSlugEntityProcessor, upgrades the Elasticsearch client to version 8 (dropping 7.x support), requires an audience value for Cloudflare Access auth, restricts Sentry scaffolder requests to a configured base URL, and strips unused inputs from the github:repo:create action, so affected configs, code, and templates must be updated before upgrading.

Matters for: Teams operating self-hosted Backstage instances that rely on Elasticsearch-backed search, Cloudflare Access authentication, or GitHub repo-creation scaffolder templates.