Red Hat Developer Hub 1.4

Getting started with Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat Customer Content Services

Abstract

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade platform for building developer portals. You can configure and customize your Developer Hub instance to meet your needs and preferences.

Preface

As a developer, you can use Red Hat Developer Hub to experience a streamlined development environment. Red Hat Developer Hub is driven by a centralized software catalog, providing efficiency to your microservices and infrastructure. It enables your product team to deliver quality code without any compromises.

Chapter 1. Overview of Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat Developer Hub (Developer Hub) serves as an open developer platform designed for building developer portals and is based on the backstage project. Using Developer Hub, the engineering teams can access a unified platform that streamlines the development process and provides a variety of tools and resources to build high-quality software efficiently.

The goal of Developer Hub is to address the difficulties associated with creating and sustaining developer portals using:

  • A centralized dashboard to view all available developer tools and resources to increase productivity
  • Self-service capabilities, along with guardrails, for cloud-native application development that complies with enterprise-class best practices
  • Proper security and governance for all developers across the enterprise

The Red Hat Developer Hub simplifies decision-making by providing a developer experience that presents a selection of internally approved tools, programming languages, and various developer resources within a self-managed portal. This approach contributes to the acceleration of application development and the maintenance of code quality, all while fostering innovation.

Chapter 2. Sizing requirements for Red Hat Developer Hub

Scalability of Red Hat Developer Hub requires significant resource allocation. The following table lists the sizing requirements for installing and running Red Hat Developer Hub, including Developer Hub application, database components, and Operator.

Table 2.1. Recommended sizing for running Red Hat Developer Hub

ComponentsRed Hat Developer Hub applicationRed Hat Developer Hub databaseRed Hat Developer Hub Operator

Central Processing Unit (CPU)

4 vCPU

2 vCPU

1 vCPU

Memory

16 GB

8 GB

1500 Mi

Storage size

2 GB

20 GB

50 Mi

Replicas

2 or more

3 or more

1 or more

Chapter 3. Supported configurations for Red Hat Developer Hub

This section describes the configurations that are required to access the Red Hat Developer Hub, including:

  • Custom applications configuration
  • Source control configuration for Developer Hub Catalog

Chapter 4. Bulk importing GitHub repositories

Important

These features are for Technology Preview only. Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs), might not be functionally complete, and Red Hat does not recommend using them for production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.

For more information on Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Scope.

Red Hat Developer Hub can automate GitHub repositories onboarding and track their import status.

4.1. Enabling and giving access to the Bulk Import feature

You can enable the Bulk Import feature for users and give them the necessary permissions to access it.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. The Bulk Import plugins are installed but disabled by default. To enable the ./dynamic-plugins/dist/janus-idp-backstage-plugin-bulk-import-backend-dynamic and ./dynamic-plugins/dist/janus-idp-backstage-plugin-bulk-import plugins, edit your dynamic-plugins.yaml with the following content:

    dynamic-plugins.yaml fragment

    plugins:
  - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/janus-idp-backstage-plugin-bulk-import-backend-dynamic
    disabled: false
  - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/janus-idp-backstage-plugin-bulk-import
    disabled: false

    See Installing and viewing dynamic plugins.

  2. Configure the required bulk.import RBAC permission for the users who are not administrators as follows:

    rbac-policy.csv fragment

    p, role:default/bulk-import, bulk.import, use, allow
g, user:default/<your_user>, role:default/bulk-import

    Note that only Developer Hub administrators or users with the bulk.import permission can use the Bulk Import feature. See Permission policies in Red Hat Developer Hub.

Verification

  • The sidebar displays a Bulk Import option.
  • The Bulk Import page shows a list of Added Repositories.

4.2. Importing multiple GitHub repositories

In Red Hat Developer Hub, you can select your GitHub repositories and automate their onboarding to the Developer Hub catalog.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Click Bulk Import in the left sidebar.

  2. Click the Add button in the top-right corner to see the list of all repositories accessible from the configured GitHub integrations.

    1. From the Repositories view, you can select any repository, or search for any accessible repositories. For each repository selected, a catalog-info.yaml is generated.
    2. From the Organizations view, you can select any organization by clicking Select in the third column. This option allows you to select one or more repositories from the selected organization.

  3. Click Preview file to view or edit the details of the pull request for each repository.

    1. Review the pull request description and the catalog-info.yaml file content.
    2. Optional: when the repository has a .github/CODEOWNERS file, you can select the Use CODEOWNERS file as Entity Owner checkbox to use it, rather than having the content-info.yaml contain a specific entity owner.
    3. Click Save.

  4. Click Create pull requests. At this point, a set of dry-run checks runs against the selected repositories to ensure they meet the requirements for import, such as:

    1. Verifying that there is no entity in the Developer Hub catalog with the name specified in the repository catalog-info.yaml
    2. Verifying that the repository is not empty

    3. Verifying that the repository contains a .github/CODEOWNERS file if the Use CODEOWNERS file as Entity Owner checkbox is selected for that repository

      • If any errors occur, the pull requests are not created, and you see a Failed to create PR error message detailing the issues. To view more details about the reasons, click Edit.
      • If there are no errors, the pull requests are created, and you are redirected to the list of added repositories.
  5. Review and merge each pull request that creates a catalog-info.yml file.

Verification

  • The Added repositories list displays the repositories you imported, each with an appropriate status: either Waiting for approval or Added.
  • For each Waiting for approval import job listed, there is a corresponding pull request adding the catalog-info.yaml file in the corresponding repository.

4.3. Managing the added repositories

You can oversee and manage the repositories that are imported to the Developer Hub.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Click Bulk Import in the left sidebar to display all the current repositories that are being tracked as Import jobs, along with their status.

    Added
    The repository is added to the Developer Hub catalog after the import pull request is merged or if the repository already contained a catalog-info.yaml file during the bulk import. Note that it may take a few minutes for the entities to be available in the catalog.
    Waiting for approval

    There is an open pull request adding a catalog-info.yaml file to the repository. You can:

    • Click the pencil icon on the right to see details about the pull request or edit the pull request content right from Developer Hub.
    • Delete the Import job, this action closes the import PR as well.
    • To transition the Import job to the Added state, merge the import pull request from the Git repository.
    Empty
    Developer Hub is unable to determine the import job status because the repository is imported from other sources but does not have a catalog-info.yaml file and lacks any import pull request adding it.
Note
  • After an import pull request is merged, the import status is marked as Added in the list of Added Repositories, but it might take a few seconds for the corresponding entities to appear in the Developer Hub Catalog.

  • A location added through other sources (like statically in an app-config.yaml file, dynamically when enabling GitHub discovery, or registered manually using the "Register an existing component" page) might show up in the Bulk Import list of Added Repositories if the following conditions are met:

    • The target repository is accessible from the configured GitHub integrations.
    • The location URL points to a catalog-info.yaml file at the root of the repository default branch.

4.4. Understanding the Bulk Import audit Logs

The Bulk Import backend plugin adds the following events to the Developer Hub audit logs. See Audit Logs in Red Hat Developer Hub for more information on how to configure and view audit logs.

Bulk Import Events:

BulkImportUnknownEndpoint
Tracks requests to unknown endpoints.
BulkImportPing
Tracks GET requests to the /ping endpoint, which allows us to make sure the bulk import backend is up and running.
BulkImportFindAllOrganizations
Tracks GET requests to the /organizations endpoint, which returns the list of organizations accessible from all configured GitHub Integrations.
BulkImportFindRepositoriesByOrganization
Tracks GET requests to the /organizations/:orgName/repositories endpoint, which returns the list of repositories for the specified organization (accessible from any of the configured GitHub Integrations).
BulkImportFindAllRepositories
Tracks GET requests to the /repositories endpoint, which returns the list of repositories accessible from all configured GitHub Integrations.
BulkImportFindAllImports
Tracks GET requests to the /imports endpoint, which returns the list of existing import jobs along with their statuses.
BulkImportCreateImportJobs
Tracks POST requests to the /imports endpoint, which allows to submit requests to bulk-import one or many repositories into the Developer Hub catalog, by eventually creating import pull requests in the target repositories.
BulkImportFindImportStatusByRepo
Tracks GET requests to the /import/by-repo endpoint, which fetches details about the import job for the specified repository.
BulkImportDeleteImportByRepo
Tracks DELETE requests to the /import/by-repo endpoint, which deletes any existing import job for the specified repository, by closing any open import pull request that could have been created.

Example bulk import audit logs

{
  "actor": {
    "actorId": "user:default/myuser",
    "hostname": "localhost",
    "ip": "::1",
    "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/128.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
  },
  "eventName": "BulkImportFindAllOrganizations",
  "isAuditLog": true,
  "level": "info",
  "message": "'get /organizations' endpoint hit by user:default/myuser",
  "meta": {},
  "plugin": "bulk-import",
  "request": {
    "body": {},
    "method": "GET",
    "params": {},
    "query": {
      "pagePerIntegration": "1",
      "sizePerIntegration": "5"
    },
    "url": "/api/bulk-import/organizations?pagePerIntegration=1&sizePerIntegration=5"
  },
  "response": {
    "status": 200
  },
  "service": "backstage",
  "stage": "completion",
  "status": "succeeded",
  "timestamp": "2024-08-26 16:41:02"
}

Chapter 5. ServiceNow Custom actions in Red Hat Developer Hub

Important

These features are for Technology Preview only. Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs), might not be functionally complete, and Red Hat does not recommend using them for production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.

For more information on Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Scope.

In Red Hat Developer Hub, you can access ServiceNow custom actions (custom actions) for fetching and registering resources in the catalog.

The custom actions in Developer Hub enable you to facilitate and automate the management of records. Using the custom actions, you can perform the following actions:

  • Create, update, or delete a record
  • Retrieve information about a single record or multiple records

5.1. Enabling ServiceNow custom actions plugin in Red Hat Developer Hub

In Red Hat Developer Hub, the ServiceNow custom actions are provided as a pre-loaded plugin, which is disabled by default. You can enable the custom actions plugin using the following procedure.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. To activate the custom actions plugin, add a package with plugin name and update the disabled field in your Helm Chart as follows: 

    global:
  dynamic:
    includes:
      - dynamic-plugins.default.yaml
    plugins:
      - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/janus-idp-backstage-scaffolder-backend-module-servicenow-dynamic
        disabled: false
    Note

    The default configuration for a plugin is extracted from the dynamic-plugins.default.yaml file, however, you can use a pluginConfig entry to override the default configuration.

  2. Set the following variables in the Helm Chart to access the custom actions: 

    servicenow:
  # The base url of the ServiceNow instance.
  baseUrl: ${SERVICENOW_BASE_URL}
  # The username to use for authentication.
  username: ${SERVICENOW_USERNAME}
  # The password to use for authentication.
  password: ${SERVICENOW_PASSWORD}

5.2. Supported ServiceNow custom actions in Red Hat Developer Hub

The ServiceNow custom actions enable you to manage records in the Red Hat Developer Hub. The custom actions support the following HTTP methods for API requests:

  • GET: Retrieves specified information from a specified resource endpoint
  • POST: Creates or updates a resource
  • PUT: Modify a resource
  • PATCH: Updates a resource
  • DELETE: Deletes a resource

5.2.1. ServiceNow custom actions

[GET] servicenow:now:table:retrieveRecord

Retrieves information of a specified record from a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.1. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to retrieve the record from

sysId

string

Required

Unique identifier of the record to retrieve

sysparmDisplayValue

enum("true", "false", "all")

Optional

Returns field display values such as true, actual values as false, or both. The default value is false.

sysparmExcludeReferenceLink

boolean

Optional

Set as true to exclude Table API links for reference fields. The default value is false.

sysparmFields

string[]

Optional

Array of fields to return in the response

sysparmView

string

Optional

Renders the response according to the specified UI view. You can override this parameter using sysparm_fields.

sysparmQueryNoDomain

boolean

Optional

Set as true to access data across domains if authorized. The default value is false.

Table 5.2. Output parameters

NameTypeDescription

result

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

The response body of the request

[GET] servicenow:now:table:retrieveRecords

Retrieves information about multiple records from a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.3. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to retrieve the records from

sysparamQuery

string

Optional

Encoded query string used to filter the results

sysparmDisplayValue

enum("true", "false", "all")

Optional

Returns field display values such as true, actual values as false, or both. The default value is false.

sysparmExcludeReferenceLink

boolean

Optional

Set as true to exclude Table API links for reference fields. The default value is false.

sysparmSuppressPaginationHeader

boolean

Optional

Set as true to suppress pagination header. The default value is false.

sysparmFields

string[]

Optional

Array of fields to return in the response

sysparmLimit

int

Optional

Maximum number of results returned per page. The default value is 10,000.

sysparmView

string

Optional

Renders the response according to the specified UI view. You can override this parameter using sysparm_fields.

sysparmQueryCategory

string

Optional

Name of the query category to use for queries

sysparmQueryNoDomain

boolean

Optional

Set as true to access data across domains if authorized. The default value is false.

sysparmNoCount

boolean

Optional

Does not execute a select count(*) on the table. The default value is false.

Table 5.4. Output parameters

NameTypeDescription

result

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

The response body of the request

[POST] servicenow:now:table:createRecord

Creates a record in a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.5. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to save the record in

requestBody

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

Optional

Field name and associated value for each parameter to define in the specified record

sysparmDisplayValue

enum("true", "false", "all")

Optional

Returns field display values such as true, actual values as false, or both. The default value is false.

sysparmExcludeReferenceLink

boolean

Optional

Set as true to exclude Table API links for reference fields. The default value is false.

sysparmFields

string[]

Optional

Array of fields to return in the response

sysparmInputDisplayValue

boolean

Optional

Set field values using their display value such as true or actual value as false. The default value is false.

sysparmSuppressAutoSysField

boolean

Optional

Set as true to suppress auto-generation of system fields. The default value is false.

sysparmView

string

Optional

Renders the response according to the specified UI view. You can override this parameter using sysparm_fields.

Table 5.6. Output parameters

NameTypeDescription

result

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

The response body of the request

[PUT] servicenow:now:table:modifyRecord

Modifies a record in a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.7. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to modify the record from

sysId

string

Required

Unique identifier of the record to modify

requestBody

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

Optional

Field name and associated value for each parameter to define in the specified record

sysparmDisplayValue

enum("true", "false", "all")

Optional

Returns field display values such as true, actual values as false, or both. The default value is false.

sysparmExcludeReferenceLink

boolean

Optional

Set as true to exclude Table API links for reference fields. The default value is false.

sysparmFields

string[]

Optional

Array of fields to return in the response

sysparmInputDisplayValue

boolean

Optional

Set field values using their display value such as true or actual value as false. The default value is false.

sysparmSuppressAutoSysField

boolean

Optional

Set as true to suppress auto-generation of system fields. The default value is false.

sysparmView

string

Optional

Renders the response according to the specified UI view. You can override this parameter using sysparm_fields.

sysparmQueryNoDomain

boolean

Optional

Set as true to access data across domains if authorized. The default value is false.

Table 5.8. Output parameters

NameTypeDescription

result

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

The response body of the request

[PATCH] servicenow:now:table:updateRecord

Updates a record in a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.9. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to update the record in

sysId

string

Required

Unique identifier of the record to update

requestBody

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

Optional

Field name and associated value for each parameter to define in the specified record

sysparmDisplayValue

enum("true", "false", "all")

Optional

Returns field display values such as true, actual values as false, or both. The default value is false.

sysparmExcludeReferenceLink

boolean

Optional

Set as true to exclude Table API links for reference fields. The default value is false.

sysparmFields

string[]

Optional

Array of fields to return in the response

sysparmInputDisplayValue

boolean

Optional

Set field values using their display value such as true or actual value as false. The default value is false.

sysparmSuppressAutoSysField

boolean

Optional

Set as true to suppress auto-generation of system fields. The default value is false.

sysparmView

string

Optional

Renders the response according to the specified UI view. You can override this parameter using sysparm_fields.

sysparmQueryNoDomain

boolean

Optional

Set as true to access data across domains if authorized. The default value is false.

Table 5.10. Output parameters

NameTypeDescription

result

Record<PropertyKey, unknown>

The response body of the request

[DELETE] servicenow:now:table:deleteRecord

Deletes a record from a table in the Developer Hub.

Table 5.11. Input parameters

NameTypeRequirementDescription

tableName

string

Required

Name of the table to delete the record from

sysId

string

Required

Unique identifier of the record to delete

sysparmQueryNoDomain

boolean

Optional

Set as true to access data across domains if authorized. The default value is false.

Legal Notice

Copyright © 2024 Red Hat, Inc.
The text of and illustrations in this document are licensed by Red Hat under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA"). An explanation of CC-BY-SA is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the original version.
Red Hat, as the licensor of this document, waives the right to enforce, and agrees not to assert, Section 4d of CC-BY-SA to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, the Red Hat logo, JBoss, OpenShift, Fedora, the Infinity logo, and RHCE are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.
Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and other countries.
Java® is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
XFS® is a trademark of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.
MySQL® is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the United States, the European Union and other countries.
Node.js® is an official trademark of Joyent. Red Hat is not formally related to or endorsed by the official Joyent Node.js open source or commercial project.
The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.