Tower

Release orchestration and operational intelligence for Backstage.

Tower is a Backstage plugin that brings visibility and control to cloud-native platforms built on Crossplane, ArgoCD, and Tekton. It provides release orchestration, promotion workflows, and operational dashboards for managing infrastructure-as-code deployments.

Part of the Hangar platform. Brand files: docs/brand/.

Features

Tabs, in the order of a change's lifecycle: Overview, Pull Requests, Pipelines, Deployments, Releases, Topology, Images, SLOs, Notifications, App Configuration, Glidepath. Plus fleet dashboards (Ops Wall, Fleet Grid).

• Release Records: structured release history, persisted as git commits, with compare and export
• Release matrix: which release is live in which environment, along the app's real promotion order
• Deployments ("Ground Control"): pipeline DAG per environment, rollout topology, ArgoCD Refresh and Sync, Tekton Re-run and Cancel
• App Configuration and Glidepath: edit environment values and cicd.yaml through a real GitOps PR, never a direct commit
• SLOs, topology, images, notifications: burn rate, live objects, artifact catalog, a time-sliced event feed

Installation

Prerequisites

• Backstage 1.17+, using the new frontend system (@backstage/frontend-defaults's createApp({ features: [...] }) — Tower's own index.ts exports a createFrontendPlugin instance, not a legacy <Route>/plugin-router pair)
• Access to a Kubernetes cluster running:
  • ArgoCD (for sync/promotion controls)
  • Tekton Pipelines (for CI/CD visibility)
  • External Secrets Operator (optional, for secret visibility)
  • Crossplane (optional, for resource composition visibility)

Install Tower into Backstage

Tower is a real, independently-versioned package, not a source folder to copy in. There's no npm registry - install it straight from a tagged commit on this repo (see RELEASING.md for how tags get cut):

yarn workspace app add "@jfillman/tower@jfillman/tower#v0.1.0"

Then register it as a feature in packages/app/src/App.tsx:

import { towerPlugin } from '@jfillman/tower';

export default createApp({
  features: [
    // ...your other features
    towerPlugin,
  ],
});

That's it - towerPlugin declares its own route (/tower), sidebar icon, and title; there's no separate nav-wiring step.

Configuration

Tower reads cluster configuration from:

• Kubernetes API access (assumes in-cluster or configured kubeconfig)
• ArgoCD API endpoint (configurable via env or backstage.io labels)
• Tekton dashboard URL (auto-discovered or configured)

Example environment variables:

ARGOCD_API=https://argocd.example.com
TEKTON_DASHBOARD=https://tekton.example.com
CLUSTER_NAME=prod

Development

Working on Tower itself

This repo builds and tests standalone - it has its own yarn.lock and doesn't need a Backstage app checked out to develop against:

yarn install
yarn tsc      # type-check
yarn lint
yarn test
yarn build    # produces dist/, same output shape backstage-cli's package build gives any plugin

Seeing changes in a real Backstage app

There's no live-link/watch mode against a consumer app today - iterate here, then cut a release (RELEASING.md) and bump the pin in the consuming app's package.json to try it live.

Architecture

Tower is a Backstage frontend plugin (new frontend system - createFrontendPlugin + PageBlueprint, see src/plugin.tsx) and consists of:

• Core Tabs — Overview, Pull Requests, Pipelines, Deployments, Releases, Topology, Images, SLOs, Notifications, App Configuration, Glidepath
• Components — Release Record UI, pipeline flow visualization, ArgoCD sync controls
• Hooks — Data fetching (Kubernetes API, ArgoCD, Tekton), release persistence, environment caching
• Utilities — YAML editing, log parsing, schema validation
• Brand (src/brand/) and shared/pullRequests — small, self-contained pieces this plugin owns outright rather than depending on host-app internals, so it builds and versions on its own

See docs/ for detailed architecture and implementation notes.

Related Repos

• Hangar — IDP core platform
• Glidepath — CI/CD engine (Tekton, PaC, cosign)
• Airframe — Crossplane XRDs and Compositions
• Backstage — Backstage base app (Tower is built as a module within)

License

Same as Hangar — see LICENSE for details.