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Should I deploy today?

@sbordeyne/backstage-plugin-should-i-deploy-today

A home page widget that answers one question, in one screen: should you deploy right now? Green for yes, amber for "you probably want to sleep tonight", red for no — with a random quip explaining itself.

Everything is decided in the browser. There is no backend module, no configuration key and no network call: the widget reads the clock and the visitor's locale, matches a rule, and picks a message.

The rules

The first rule that matches wins, so the order is the whole behaviour:

Rule When Status Colour
friday_the_13th Friday the 13th KO red
weekend Saturday or Sunday KO red
holiday Public holiday in the visitor's country KO red
holiday_eve Public holiday tomorrow KO red
friday Any Friday KO red
evening_or_night Before 09:00, or from 18:00 KO red
thursday_afternoon Thursday from 16:00 WARNING amber
afternoon Any other day from 16:00 WARNING amber
none Anything left — a regular working morning OK green

Two consequences of that ordering are deliberate:

  • Holidays outrank Friday. Christmas Day 2026 falls on a Friday, and the widget says something about Christmas rather than something about Fridays.
  • Friday outranks the afternoon. A Friday at 16:30 is a Friday problem, not an afternoon problem, so it is red rather than amber.

Where the holidays come from

date-holidays, restricted to public holidays and initialised with the country from Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions() — the visitor's own locale, falling back to US when the locale carries no region. The same call provides the timezone.

Four holidays have their own message sets: Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Easter Monday and All Saints' Day. Every other public holiday, in every country, uses the generic set.

Holiday keys are name slugs, not labels

The message sets in src/data/reasons.json are keyed by the holiday's English name, lowercased, with non-alphanumeric characters removed and spaces replaced by underscores: Christmas Day → christmas_day, New Year's Day → new_years_day. A key that matches no holiday name is never an error — it just silently never fires, and the generic default set is used instead. Verify the slug when adding a set.

Installation

yarn --cwd packages/app add @sbordeyne/backstage-plugin-should-i-deploy-today

The plugin targets the new frontend system and exports itself as the package default:

// packages/app/src/App.tsx
import shouldIDeployTodayPlugin from '@sbordeyne/backstage-plugin-should-i-deploy-today';

export const app = createApp({
  features: [shouldIDeployTodayPlugin],
});

It contributes one HomePageWidgetBlueprint extension, which puts Should I deploy today? in the home page's widget picker. Nothing has to be composed by hand, and the widget carries its own minimum size (2 rows, 2 columns).

Customising the messages

All the copy lives in src/data/reasons.json, one array per rule, plus the holiday and holiday_tomorrow maps. The widget picks uniformly at random from the matching array on every render and on every press of Refresh, so a rule with a single message is a rule that always says the same thing.

Changing the copy means forking the package — the messages are bundled, not configuration.

Theming

The surface uses @backstage/ui intent backgrounds (success, warning, danger) and Text variants rather than hand-picked colours or font sizes, so the widget follows whatever theme the app is running, in both light and dark mode.