How to deploy Backstage to AWS

Deploy a Backstage production image to ECS Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer.

Prerequisites

A Git repository containing your application and its production build command.
A Ravion account with your AWS account connected. Start free at Ravion signup.
The Ravion CLI installed and authenticated. See CLI installation.

The examples use my-org/my-app as a placeholder. Replace it with your repository before applying the config.

Set up this Backstage app for Ravion ECS hosting.

Configure the deployment

Ravion creates the VPC, ECS cluster, service, and optional RDS database in your AWS account. This guide uses a repository Dockerfile instead of Railpack because the framework-specific image build requires explicit container instructions. Backstage’s production Docker guide documents a host-build variant and a multi-stage variant. Ravion builds from your repository, so use the multi-stage Dockerfile from Backstage’s Docker deployment guide at the repository root. The scaffolded packages/backend/Dockerfile is the host-build variant: it expects yarn install, yarn tsc, and yarn build:backend to run before docker build, so it does not work unmodified with Ravion. Backstage also documents different .dockerignore requirements for the two variants. The container listens on port 7007.

ravion.yaml

project:
  givenId: backstage-app
  name: Backstage app
environments:
  - givenId: production
    name: Production
    moduleInstances:
      - givenId: network
        name: Network
        type: rvn-aws-network
        version: 1.0.0
        input:
          aws_account_id: ravion-prod
          aws_region: us-east-1
          name: backstage-production
      - givenId: database
        name: PostgreSQL
        type: rvn-rds
        version: 1.0.0
        input:
          network:
            moduleGivenIdRef: network
          name: backstage-production
          db_name: backstage
          username: backstageadmin
          engine_major_version: "15"
      - givenId: cluster
        name: ECS cluster
        type: rvn-ecs-cluster
        version: 1.0.0
        input:
          network:
            moduleGivenIdRef: network
          name: backstage-production
      - givenId: web
        name: Backstage web service
        type: rvn-ecs-web
        version: 1.0.0
        input:
          cluster:
            moduleGivenIdRef: cluster
          name: backstage-production-web
          build_source: dockerfile
          source_repo: my-org/my-backstage-app
          dockerfile: Dockerfile
          container_port: 7007
          fargate_size:
            vcpu: 1
            memory_gb: 2

Set the Backstage database connection and integration credentials through Secrets Manager. The current module definitions support ECS runtime secrets but do not automatically connect rvn-rds outputs to a secret, so create the secret after reading the RDS outputs.

Apply and connect your domain

ravion project create --given-id backstage-app --name "Backstage app"
ravion project config apply backstage-app --file ravion.yaml --dry-run
ravion project config apply backstage-app --file ravion.yaml

Use custom domains to configure the ALB hostname and certificate.

Next steps

Custom domains

Point a domain at your deployed service and manage its certificate.

Project config

Preview and apply Ravion configuration from source control.

Pipelines

Add approvals, migrations, and deployment automation.

Logs and metrics

Inspect deploy output and production health in Ravion.

​Prerequisites

​Configure the deployment

​Apply and connect your domain

​Next steps