Release notes for Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1

Red Hat Developer Hub (Developer Hub) 1.1 is now generally available. Developer Hub is a fully supported, enterprise-grade productized version of upstream Backstage v1.23.4. You can access and download the Red Hat Developer Hub from the Customer Portal.

Red Hat Developer Hub support

If you experience difficulty with a procedure described in this documentation, visit the Red Hat Customer Portal. You can use the Red Hat Customer Portal for the following purposes:

To search or browse through the Red Hat Knowledgebase of technical support articles about Red Hat products.
To create a support case for Red Hat Global Support Services (GSS). For support case creation, select Red Hat Developer Hub as the product and select the appropriate product version.

1. About this release

The release notes provide high-level coverage of the features that have been implemented in Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1 and document known issues in this release.

Some features within this release may be available as a Technology Preview, providing access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and to provide feedback during the development process.

For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, read Technology Preview Support Scope.

Benefits of Red Hat Developer Hub include:

Increased developer productivity: Increases productivity by eliminating common organizational challenges, enabling seamless collaboration, and providing clear guidelines for creating, developing, and deploying applications.
Unified self-service dashboard: Provides development teams with a unified dashboard covering various aspects such as Git, CI/CD, SAST/DAST, Supply Chain, OpenShift/Kubernetes cluster, JIRA, monitoring, API, documentation, and more, facilitated by over 150 plugins. All curated by a platform engineering team, aligning with the company’s best practices.
Best practices through software templates: Automates organizational best practices by encoding common tasks such as creating new applications, running Ansible jobs, and establishing CI/CD pipelines for production deployment in Git.
Scalable technical documentation: Code and documentation resides in the same repository, eliminating dependencies on proprietary document systems.
Efficient onboarding for new developers: New developers quickly adapt and become productive within a short timeframe.
Robust enterprise Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Empowers administrators to create roles, assign users or groups to roles, and implement robust security policies for enhanced access control.

1.1. Upgrading the Red Hat Developer Hub Helm Chart

You can upgrade to a new version of Red Hat Developer Hub by using:

OpenShift web console
1. In the Developer perspective, click Helm to open the Helm Releases tab.
2. Click the three dots next to the Helm release entry and select Upgrade.
3. In the Upgrade Helm Release page, select the version of Developer Hub that you want to upgrade to from the chart version drop-down list.
4. Click Upgrade.
  
  Note
  
  You must wait while the resources in the older versions are deleted and newer versions of the Developer Hub pods are launched.
5. Close all open Developer Hub web pages, and log in again to verify that the upgrade was successful.

OpenShift CLI

Log in to the OpenShift cluster as the cluster administrator and switch to the devhub project.
```
$ oc login -u <user> -p <password> https://api.<HOSTNAME>:6443
$ oc project devhub
```

For a new version of the Developer Hub helm chart, run the following upgrade command:

$ helm upgrade -i rhdh -f new-values.yml \
  openshift-helm-charts/redhat-developer-hub --version 1.1.0

Note	You can also provide extra values to the chart by creating a `new-values.yml` file on your workstation with values that override the attributes in the installed chart or by adding new attributes.

2. New features

This section highlights new features in Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1.

2.1. Red Hat Developer Hub Operator is now generally available (GA)

You can use the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator to install Developer Hub on your OpenShift Container Platform cluster. For more information, see the Installing Red Hat Developer Hub using the Operator section in the Administration guide.

2.2. Change in productized version

Red Hat Developer Hub productized version is now based on the upstream Backstage project v1.23.4.

2.3. Ability to manage role-based access controls (RBAC) using the web interface

As an administrator, you can now use Developer Hub to assign specific roles and permissions to individual users or groups. Using the Developer Hub web interface, you can perform the following actions:

Creating a role
Editing a role and related permissions
Deleting a role

For more information, see the Role-Based Access Control in Red Hat Developer Hub section in the Administration guide.

2.4. Migration of the Red Hat Developer Hub to the new backend system

Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1 is now migrated to the Backstage new backend system. With this migration, you might notice the following functionality-related changes in the Developer Hub application:

2.4.1. Configuration change in the GitHub Organization catalog provider

The GitHub Organization catalog module for the new backend system switched to a new GithubMultiOrgEntityProvider provider, which allows ingesting data from multiple GitHub organizations. This new provider brings in changes to the default plugin configuration settings.

2.4.2. New Scaffolder Identity client

Identity client functioning differs slightly between the one provided by the new backend system Scaffolder plugin and the one used in the previous release.

The new backend system’s Scaffolder plugin utilizes an identity service that introduces slight differences impacting error handling. For example, when encountering an invalid authorization header in a request, Developer Hub logs the error into the console instead of discarding it.

2.4.3. Enable all GitLab actions

Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1 enables all GitLab actions by default.

2.5. Support for Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS)

You can now install and use the Red Hat Developer Hub on an EKS cluster.

For more information, see the Red Hat Developer Hub integration with Amazon Web Services section in the Administration guide.

2.6. Support for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)

You can now install and use the Red Hat Developer Hub on an AKS cluster.

2.7. Support for viewing installed plugins using the web interface

As an administrator, you can now use the Developer Hub web interface to view a table of plugins that are installed. This feature uses the dynamic-plugins-info frontend component, which generates a table of plugins that are currently installed in the Red Hat Developer Hub. You can apply client-side sorting, filtering, and pagination to the plugins table.

2.8. Supported plugins in Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1

To get a comprehensive list of supported dynamic plugins, see the Dynamic plugins included in Red Hat Developer Hub section in the Administration guide.

3. Technology preview

This section lists features that are in Technology Preview in Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1.

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.

3.1. Plugins available in Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat Developer Hub incorporates various dynamic plugins. Red Hat fully supports certain plugins, while others are community-supported projects. Some plugins are enabled by default, while others require configuration and are consequently disabled by default.

For more information about how to enable, disable, or configure dynamic plugins, see the Installing dynamic plugins section in the Administration guide.

To get a comprehensive list of supported dynamic plugins, see the Dynamic plugins included in Red Hat Developer Hub section in the Administration guide.

4. Known issues

This section lists known issues with Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1:

Helm Chart upgrade release failing on Openshift Developer Console: If you have installed Developer Hub manually using the Helm CLI, the helm chart release upgrade fails in the OpenShift Developer Console.

Workaround: You can use the Helm CLI to upgrade. If you still want to upgrade using the console, then a workaround is to select the Helm Chart version from the drop-down list and select the Developer Hub version you want to upgrade to. Before performing this workaround, ensure that you save your values.yaml configuration file to some other location.
Issues with the Developer Hub upgrade path using a persistent cache: If you have configured a cache with the Red Hat Developer Hub and are planning to upgrade to its new version, ensure that you have deleted that cache. A new cache will be recreated after the upgrade.
Events plugin redesign in progress for the new backend system: The Events plugin is not completely supported by the new backend system, and thus its usefulness is greatly reduced, if not completely broken.

A complete redesign of the Events plugin support for the new backend system is in progress, but the plugin is still not available for integration into this release of Red Hat Developer Hub. This limitation temporarily prevents third parties from fully using events in plugins or modules they want to provide as dynamic plugins for Red Hat Developer Hub.
Issues with the RBAC Plugin: In the new backend system, automatically getting the IDs of all dynamically installed plugins is not possible. This means that the permissions of dynamic plugins supporting RBAC will not be automatically displayed in the RBAC UI.

Workaround: You can manually add a list of dynamic plugin IDs supporting RBAC in the Developer Hub application configuration file.

5. Fixed issues

This section lists fixed issues with Red Hat Developer Hub 1.1:

Fix an inability to dynamically load a number of upstream backend plugins: Before this release, a whole category of upstream or third-party backstage backend plugins could not be loaded dynamically when converted to dynamic plugins. Impacted plugins were those using the resolvePackagePath() backstage API method. This issue impacted most of the backend plugins using the database service and providing migration scripts. This release removes such an important limitation of the dynamic plugin feature.
Incorrect configuration in the Atlassian Auth provider: Before this release, the authorization URL was constructed as ${baseUrl}/oauth/authorize, which did not align with the Atlassian expected path, resulting in an authentication error. Now, the users are directed to the authorization URL to get an authorization code for successful authentication.
RBAC: CSV repopulates the database whenever there is a server restart: Before this release, the policy.csv file was used to load permissions into Developer Hub. There might be instances of overlapping permissions, and the permissions could be reloaded into the database.
Validation is not working for the Create Role API: Before this release, the validation process in the Create Role API was ineffective, allowing the creation of roles that were invalid. This resulted in input errors when attempting to update or delete these roles.
RBAC backend plugin: policy change requires server restart: Before this release, manually manipulating the policy.csv file led to inconsistent behavior, causing the manipulated permission or role to not apply correctly within the RBAC plugin.
No support for monitoring Red Hat Developer Hub plugins: Before this release, no support was provided to administrators for monitoring Red Hat Developer Hub plugins. With this release, administrators can generate a list of Developer Hub plugins and their versions for monitoring purposes.