This update introduces built-in monitoring for the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator. By enabling spec.monitoring.enabled: true in your Backstage custom resource, the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator will automatically manage service monitor resources for Prometheus metrics collection on the /metrics endpoint. This simplifies the monitoring process, eliminating the need for manual service monitor setup, and enhances the user experience on OpenShift and Kubernetes clusters with Prometheus Operator installed.

For more information, see Enabling metrics monitoring in a Red Hat Developer Hub Operator installation on an OpenShift Container Platform cluster.

This update introduces localization support and French localization to these core plugins:

This enhancement allows Red Hat Developer Hub to display content in French, improving accessibility for users who speak French. AI/Cursor automation ensures a seamless translation process, enhancing the user experience by providing content in their preferred language, preparing Red Hat Developer Hub for use in multilingual environments and fostering a more inclusive developer community.

For more information, see Selecting the language for your Developer Hub instance.

With this update, localization support is introduced for strings defined in Red Hat Developer Hub configuration files such as app-config.yaml and dynamic-plugins.default.yaml. This enables users to customize the interface in their preferred language, providing a consistent multilingual interface across these components:

This localization support ensures a more inclusive and user-friendly experience for a diverse user base, improving user experience and supporting global users.

For more information, see Enabling Quickstart localization in RHDH.

With this update, Red Hat Developer Hub integrates the Backstage localization framework, enabling users to load translations provided by their plugins. The selected language will persist according to the user settings persistence configuration. Additionally, users can load translations from an external JSON file, allowing them to override existing translations or add translations for existing translation keys.

For more information, see Localization support for plugins.

With this update, users can enhance the Bulk Import plugin by importing repositories using scaffolder templates. This automates and optimizes the process by integrating with existing Backstage templates and Orchestrator workflows. Users can select their preferred pre-ingestion workflow and incorporate various scaffolder actions into their bulk import process, resulting in a more efficient and flexible Bulk Import experience.

For more information, see Input parameters for Bulk Import Scaffolder template.

With this update, you can enable notification alerts whenever a Software Template is updated with a new version.

For more information, see Enabling Software Template version update notifications in Red Hat Developer Hub.

With this update, Red Hat Developer Hub supports Software Template provenance and a dedicated dependency view to improve component traceability and lifecycle management across your organization.

For more information, see Tracking component origin and Software Template version.

With this update, Red Hat Developer Hub users can customize their homepage, empowering personalization and productivity. Users can now move, resize, remove, and add existing cards, fostering a more flexible and adaptable user experience. The customization options are based on the existing settings, and users can reset their configuration to the default. The feature aims to improve the resize and reorder mechanism, and update existing cards to work better on different card sizes.

For more information, see Customizing the Home page.

The Developer Hub community plugins have been updated to Backstage version 1.42.

With this update, Red Hat Developer Hub includes a guided Quick Start experience tailored for the developer persona. This new feature appears automatically upon a developer's first login to help them get started quickly and accelerate adoption of the platform.

The developer Quick Start provides guided next steps for key features, including:

This feature is integrated with RBAC, allowing platform engineers to configure the Quick Start content and conditionally display it to specific developer groups for personalized onboarding.

For more information, see Setting up and configuring your first Red Hat Developer Hub instance.

With this update, the plugin support model is now transparently aligned with Red Hat's standard release classifications. The Verified badge is removed, a clearer tiered support system is implemented, and plugin metadata are enhanced, providing a more informative and user-friendly experience in the Extensions Catalog. This change improves visibility into plugin maturity, enhances customer trust, and ensures internal consistency across the catalog.

For more information, see Utilizing plugin indicators and support types in Red Hat Developer Hub.

With this update, Red Hat Developer Hub includes a reorganized Extensions navigation, enabling the user to manage installed packages more easily. The former Installed Plugins tab is renamed to Installed Packages and includes new row actions that allow you to edit, enable, and disable packages directly from the list.

Red Hat Developer Hub now supports high availability setups in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This enhancement allows the deployment to scale beyond a single replica, ensuring the application remains operational and accessible even in the event of failures or disruptions.

For more information, see Configuring high availability in Red Hat Developer Hub.

Previously, injecting necessary files (extraFiles) and environment variables (extraEnvs) was restricted to the default backstage-backend container.

With this update, you can configure resource injection for any container in the Red Hat Developer Hub pod, including sidecars and system containers. This allows you to complete the job of deploying custom components, such as security agents, log collectors, or configuration managers, that require specific volumes or runtime variables to operate successfully.

For more information, see Injecting extra files and environment variables into Backstage containers.

With this update, the Argo CD, Tekton, and Topology plugins requires the Kubernetes Frontend and Kubernetes Backend plugins. Before this update, these plugins depended only on the Kubernetes Backend plugin, and the feature provided by the Kubernetes Frontend plugin where provided by the removed @janus-idp/shared-react package.

Backstage CR versions v1alpha1 and v1alpha2 were deprecated in 1.7 and will be removed in 1.9.

To enhance performance, decrease image size, and reduce maintenance, the method of including "wrapped" dynamic plugins within the main Red Hat Developer Hub container image was deprecated in RHDH 1.7.0. We are transitioning to a model where all dynamic plugins will be distributed as independent OCI artifacts.

This is a deprecation notice only; there are no breaking changes in 1.8.0 related to plugins, wrappers, or support for OCI artifacts. All previously bundled plugins will continue to be bundled in this release. However, we encourage customers to prepare for the removal of wrappers in a future release by beginning to use the new OCI artifacts in 1.9.0. Documentation will be updated to guide this migration.

For more information, see Loading a plugin packaged as an OCI image.

The Open Cluster Management (OCM) plugins integrates your Red Hat Developer Hub instance with the MultiClusterHub and MultiCluster engines of OCM. The OCM plugins are deprecated as of RHDH 1.8, and will be removed in a future release.

With this update, users can bulk import entities from GitLab into Red Hat Developer Hub, enhancing onboarding efficiency.

For more information, see Importing multiple GitLab repositories.

You can enhance your Red Hat Developer Hub integration by leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. This integration enables seamless communication with various Artificial Intelligence (AI) clients, facilitating efficient data exchange and expanding the functionality of the platform.

You can use OpenShift AI Connector for RHDH to enable users to use Red Hat Developer Hub (RHDH) to surface AI Models and Model Servers from Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI) directly into the RHDH/Backstage Catalog.

With this update, RHDH Local includes essential Getting Started and How-To documentation about RHDH Local which is embedded as TechDocs. In RHDH Local, you can access this built-in documentation directly within the application.

Additional information about configuring RHDH for its supported platforms can be found at https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_developer_hub/.

The Developer Lightspeed for RHDH plugin has completed its migration from the Road-Core Service to Lightspeed Core (LCORE). This architectural change provides enhanced stability and prepares the plugin for future feature development during the Developer Preview.

With this update, RHDH Local integrates the Tech Radar and Quay plugins, for a better out of the box experience for users. The Tech Radar plugin provides a visually engaging element on the homepage or via navigation, and showcases the dynamic plugins loading mechanism for simple Developer Hub extension. The Quay plugin demonstrates integration with external services and provides a practical example of extending the Developer Hub software catalog.

With this update, RHDH Local default homepage integrates a floating action button with quick links for easy access to documentation and information.

With this update, RHDH Local integrates pre-loaded essential templates, enabling users to create their own custom plugins and add TechDocs or software components to existing projects within Red Hat Developer Hub. This enhancement demonstrates Developer Hub extensibility, empowers users to extend the platform, and enhances the overall user experience by promoting collaboration and customization.

With this release, Red Hat Developer Hub integrates the Scorecard plugin, enabling users to visualize software quality and health metrics directly in Developer Hub.

Developers can visualize scorecards with the metrics available to the their role in a tab on component detail pages, allowing them to quickly check the quality of their code and ensure it meets team standards.

Platform engineers can configure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from various data sources, with initial support for GitHub open pull requests and Jira open issues. Custom metric providers will allow for the addition of more data sources.

This simplifies the monitoring of applications by offering a single, clear report on health, security, and compliance.

You can automate the conversion and packaging of standard Backstage plugins into RHDH dynamic plugins by using the RHDH Dynamic Plugin Factory tool.

The core function of the Dynamic Plugin Factory tool is to streamline the dynamic plugin build process, offering the following capabilities:

The Dynamic Plugin Factory tool provides a simplified, reproducible method for developers and platform engineers to create and test dynamic plugins using a pre-configured dynamic plugin factory container and documentation, significantly easing migration and testing.

For more information, see RHDH Dynamic Plugin Factory.

With this release, you can use the Events Module together with scheduled updates to make sure your GitHub user or catalog entities are updated whenever changes occur in the external system. See Configuring Events module.

If you have an existing Operator-backed instance of Developer Hub with the Orchestrator, you must update your dynamic-plugins ConfigMap to set the version of the Orchestrator plugins to 1.8.2 once the Developer Hub Operator is upgraded to 1.8. Otherwise, the Developer Hub instance will not be upgraded at all.

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: dynamic-plugins-rhdh
data:
  dynamic-plugins.yaml: |
    includes:
      - dynamic-plugins.default.yaml
    plugins:
      - package: "@redhat/backstage-plugin-orchestrator@1.8.2"
        disabled: false
      - package: "@redhat/backstage-plugin-orchestrator-backend-dynamic@1.8.2"
        disabled: false
        dependencies:
          - ref: sonataflow
      - package: "@redhat/backstage-plugin-scaffolder-backend-module-orchestrator-dynamic@1.8.2"
        disabled: false
      - package: "@redhat/backstage-plugin-orchestrator-form-widgets@1.8.2"
        disabled: false

Updating the deployment configuration using the values.yaml to include specific dynamic plugin configurations might cause an error during the deployment process.

When configuring the dynamicRoutes for the red-hat-developer-hub.backstage-plugin-dynamic-home-page plugin, the use of the placeholder {{firstName}} in a configuration property, for example title, can result in the following fatal deployment error:

"function firstName not defined".

This error prevents the cluster from spinning up correctly.

dynamicPlugins:
  frontend:
    red-hat-developer-hub.backstage-plugin-dynamic-home-page:
      dynamicRoutes:
        - path: /
          importName: DynamicHomePage
          config:
            props:
              title: 'Howdy {{firstName}} or {{displayName}}'

There is an known issue with the displayed starting time in the Orchestrator 1.8.2 plugins when starting a workflow. When a workflow starts executing, the starting time is not displayed correctly in the Results window of the workflow instance. It remains this way until the workflow changes state. This will be fixed in a future release.

In this update, the RHDH Local default configuration includes built-in TechDocs. However, when selecting the new "RHDH Local Guide" link in the RHDH Local UI sidebar, the Catalog link is also highlighted. There is currently no known workaround.

When installation is disabled, the actions on the Installed Packages page are still shown. Similarly, if the YAML file is misconfigured, the actions appear, but the API call fails with an error. This doesn’t break the UI, the API failure is handled gracefully, and the correct reason for the failure is displayed in the UI.

Changes to the Developer Hub Operator default configuration do not persist across operator upgrades. There is no known workaround.

This error occurs when a user tries to access a package or plugin that does not have an associated entity YAML. Users will not encounter this error under normal usage; it only appears if they manually modify the plugin or package name in the URL. This ticket will handle this scenario more gracefully by indicating why access to a particular plugin is not allowed.

For packages with missing spec.dynamicArtifact value in their catalog entity, we currently show - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dis/…​

plugins:
  - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/backstage-community-plugin-quay
    disabled: false
  - package: oci://ghcr.io/redhat-developer/rhdh-plugin-export-overlays/backstage-community-plugin-quay-backend:bs_1.42.5__1.6.0!backstage-community-plugin-quay-backend
    disabled: false
    pluginConfig:
      quay:
        apiUrl: ${QUAY_API_URL}
        apiKey: ${QUAY_API_KEY}

plugins:
  - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/roadiehq-scaffolder-backend-argocd-dynamic
    disabled: true
  - package: ./dynamic-plugins/dist/backstage-community-plugin-redhat-argocd
    disabled: false
  - package: oci://ghcr.io/redhat-developer/rhdh-plugin-export-overlays/backstage-community-plugin-redhat-argocd-backend:bs_1.42.5__0.10.0!backstage-community-plugin-redhat-argocd-backend
    disabled: false
    pluginConfig:
      argocd:
        username: "${ARGOCD_USERNAME}"
        password: "${ARGOCD_PASSWORD}"
        appLocatorMethods:
          - type: 'config'
            instances:
              - name: argoInstance1
                url: "${ARGOCD_INSTANCE1_URL}"

For ArgoCD, you will need to update your app-config.yaml to add its id to permission.rbac.pluginsWithPermission:

permission:
  enabled: true
  rbac:
    pluginsWithPermission:
      - argocd

Plugins that are not bundled with Red Hat Developer Hub, meaning not part of the Red Hat Developer Hub wrappers, might experience styling issues or broken visuals when using Material UI v5 components.

To resolve Out-Of-Memory errors in the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator, adjust memory settings manually: