Stack Overflow Teams Backend Plugin

Backend counterpart of the Stack Overflow for Teams Plugin.

Areas of Responsibility

The Stack Overflow for Teams Backend plugin is responsible for:

• Indexing all questions from the private Stack Overflow instance (an enhanced version of the existing community plugins in the Backstage repository).
• Handling API requests via createStackOverflowApi and createStackOverflowService to the Stack Overflow instance for retrieving:
  • /users
  • /tags
  • /questions
  • Posting new questions via /questions
• Managing OAuth authentication flow to securely access Stack Overflow private instances via createStackOverflowAuth
• HTTP-only cookie the Stack Overflow Token is set as a secure http-only cookie to the frontend with 24 hours expiration.

OAuth Authentication Flow

The backend is the only component that directly utilizes the encrypted Stack Overflow access tokens for requests.

Authorization Flow Details

/auth/start

• Generates PKCE Code Verifier.
• Hashes Code Verifier to obtain Code Challenge.
• Generates a state (random string).
• Stores Code Verifier and State in a secure, HTTP-only cookie accessible only to the server.

/callback

• Retrieves the stored Code Verifier and State.
• Validates that the received state matches the one from Stack Overflow's query string parameter.
• The backend requests an Access Token using the stored Code Verifier.
• Stores the Stack Overflow Access Token in a secure, HTTP-only cookie.

Installation

This plugin is installed via the backstage-plugin-stack-overflow-teams-backend package. To install it to your backend package, run the following command:

yarn --cwd packages/backend add backstage-plugin-stack-overflow-teams-backend

Then add the plugin to your backend in packages/backend/src/index.ts:

const backend = createBackend();

// ...

backend.add(import('backstage-plugin-stack-overflow-teams-backend'));

Development

This plugin backend can be started in a standalone mode from directly in this package with yarn start. It is a limited setup that is most convenient when developing the plugin backend itself.

If you want to run the entire project, including the frontend, run yarn dev from the root directory.