Golden Paths: How Backstage Templates Guarantee Correct-by-Default Services
Documentation gets ignored. Runbooks get outdated. Wiki pages accumulate conflicting instructions from three different authors. When the "right way" to create a service exists only in documentation, every new service is a chance to deviate from convention.
Backstage Scaffolder templates change this equation. Instead of documenting the correct path and hoping engineers follow it, we encode the correct path into a form that produces correct output every time. This post is about how our template chain works, why the dependency order matters, and what happens when you click Create.