Welcome to the Node.js library package for the notifications plugin!

To be able to send notifications from other backend plugins, the NotificationService must be initialized for the environment. Add notification service to your plugin.ts as a dependency for init

import { notificationService } from '@backstage/plugin-notifications-node';

export const myPlugin = createBackendPlugin({
  pluginId: 'myPlugin',
  register(env) {
    env.registerInit({
      deps: {
        config: coreServices.rootConfig,
        logger: coreServices.logger,
        httpRouter: coreServices.httpRouter,
        notificationService: notificationService,
      },
      async init({ config, logger, httpRouter, notificationService }) {
        httpRouter.use(
          await createRouter({
            config,
            logger,
            permissions,
            notificationService,
          }),
        );
      },
    });
  },
});

You also need to set up the @backstage/plugin-notifications-backend and @backstage/plugin-notifications to be able to show notifications in the UI.

To send notifications from backend plugin, use the NotificationService::send functionality. This function will save the notification and optionally signal the frontend to show the latest status for users.

When sending notifications, you can specify the entity reference of the notification. If the entity reference is a user, the notification will be sent to only that user. If it's a group, the notification will be sent to all members of the group. If it's some other entity, the notification will be sent to the owner of that entity.

If the notification has scope set and user already has notification with that scope, the existing notification will be updated with the new notification values and moved to inbox as unread.