Customize your deployments with the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade internal developer portal. Combined with Red Hat OpenShift, it allows platform engineering teams to offer software templates, get up to speed on deployments, and follow a company's best practices.

Red Hat Developer Hub 1.2 introduced several new features:

• The new Argo CD front-end plug-in has an updated UX, which includes status per environment, and more information for developers.
• The new Red Hat Developer Hub Orchestrator extends the default scaffolder and allows templates to use eventing, notifications, approvals, retry, and long-running tasks for more sophisticated Software Template automation.
• The new ScaffoldedFrom metadata item brings greater clarity over component provenance to the software catalog by linking components to the software template that created them.
• The new Red Hat Developer Hub theme uses the PatternFly design system.

You can use either a Helm chart or the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator to deploy Red Hat Developer Hub. This article will demonstrate the latter approach.

Install the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator

In OperatorHub, search for rhdh and select the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator to install it, as shown in Figure 1.

Red Hat Developer Hub will provide the Backstage custom resource (CR), as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: rhdh.redhat.com/v1alpha1
kind: Backstage
metadata:
  name: developer-hub
  namespace: rhdh-operator
spec:
  application:
    appConfig:
      mountPath: /opt/app-root/src
    extraFiles:
      mountPath: /opt/app-root/src
    replicas: 1
    route:
      enabled: true
  database:
    enableLocalDb: true

The Backstage custom resource will result in the following (Figure 2).

To access the Backstage instance, get the route (in this case, the Edge route), which uses the service backstage-developer-hub to connect the pods:

oc get route
NAME                      HOST/PORT                                                                                   PATH   SERVICES                  PORT           TERMINATION     WILDCARD
backstage-developer-hub   backstage-developer-hub-rhdh-operator.apps.example.com   /      backstage-developer-hub   http-backend   edge/Redirect   None

Then, access Red Hat Developer Hub via a web browser (Figure 3).

This will bring you to the Red Hat Developer Hub main page, shown in Figure 4.

Go to $ROUTE/settings for details such as the following:

• The profile
• The appearance
• Developer Hub metadata
• Backstage identity

Customization

Red Hat Developer Hub provides a wide range of customizations via the Backstage custom resource, which offers full control through spec.rawRuntimeConfig.

This field in the Backstage CR currently allows you to fully customize some of the resources created by the operator (including the application Deployment), by providing a ConfigMap with the whole resource definition. The operator is for advanced or uncommon scenarios because it can detail exactly how the OpenShift resources will be created.

It currently allows full details, and later it will allow partial patches instead of fully merging (see Janus-idp Pull 388). With the Backstage operator, the user can specify a list of app-config ConfigMaps and Backstage/Red Hat Developer Hub will handle merging them to create an effective app-config.

The raw ConfigMap can contain several keys, and each key (like deployment.yaml) can override the entire resource definition. Soon, when the Janus-idp PR goes into production, a custom resource field will allow you to specify a partial definition that will be used for merging instead.

Here is an example:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: showcase-config
data:
  deployment.yaml: |-
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    metadata:
      name: backstage
    spec:
      replicas: 1
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          app: backstage  # backstage-<cr-name>
      template:
         metadata:
           labels:
             app: backstage # backstage-<cr-name>
         spec:
           containers:
             - name: backstage
               image: quay.io/janus-idp/backstage-showcase
               imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
               ports:
                 - name: http
                   containerPort: 7007
               envFrom:
                 - secretRef:
                     name: postgres-secrets

Update for Developer Hub 1.4 or later

Note: This article has been updated to include new options introduced in later Red Hat Developer Hub versions.

Later versions streamlined the customization with three options, also discussed in How to customize configuration on Red Hat Developer Hub (Developer Hub) Operator in Openshift 4.

  deployment:
    patch:
      spec:
          spec:
            containers:
              - name: backstage-backend
                resources:
                  limits:
                    cpu: '1'
                    ephemeral-storage: 5Gi
                    memory: 3Gi
                  requests:
                    cpu: 440m
                    memory: 256Mi

spec:
 application:
   appConfig:
     mountPath: /opt/app-root/src
     configMaps:
        - name: my-rhdh-app-config

spec:
 rawRuntimeConfig:
   backstageConfig: showcase-config

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator, you can collect two artifacts as follows:

• The inspect file of the namespace: oc adm inspect ns/namespace_selected
• The Backstage CR: oc get backstage

Conclusion

This article provided a short introduction to the Red Hat Developer Hub Operator and how to customize deployments.

The customization is quite powerful because it allows you to set Kubernetes deployment-specific specifications. This tool can be useful for support cases, as detailed in the solution Using inspect for DG 8 troubleshooting.

For any other specific inquiries, open a case with Red Hat support. Our global team of experts can help you with any issues. 
Thanks for Wagner Queiroz for his input on this article and dicussions on RHDH Operator/deployments.