Deploy Red Hat Developer Hub with the Ansible Automation Platform integration

We’ve built the identity foundation, configured the integrations, generated tokens, and established a registry for your plugins. Now, it’s time to bring these components together under a unified interface. By the end of this lesson, you will have a live, production-ready portal in Red Hat Developer Hub (Developer Hub).

Prerequisites:

• Run the plugin registry within the cluster and make sure it’s accessible (Lesson 8).
• All Developer Hub-specific secrets must be present in the rhdh namespace (Lesson 7).
• The Allow external users to create OAuth2 tokens setting must be active (Lesson 6). 

In this lesson, you will:

• Deploy the Developer Hub with the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform integration.
• Verify that all dynamic plugins are successfully loaded and active.
• Access the Developer Hub dashboard and confirm the presence of Ansible Automation Platform features.

Deploy Developer Hub with the Ansible Automation Platform integration

Now that we have prepared the environment and understand the plugins, let’s deploy Developer Hub with the Ansible Automation Platform integration.

Deploy Developer Hub 

Deploy Developer Hub with Ansible Automation Platform plugins configured. The Developer Hub deployment uses Kustomize to overlay configurations onto the base resources.

oc apply -k clusters/demo/instances/rhdh/

This single command deploys:

• Backstage CR with dynamic plugin configuration pointing to the plugin registry.
• ConfigMap with Ansible Automation Platform authentication settings.
• Secrets for the Ansible Automation Platform connection, OAuth, and backend configuration.
• Patches to mount the Ansible Automation Platform config into the Backstage instance.

Verify the deployment 

1. Monitor the deployment by watching pods come up: 

   oc get pods -n rhdh -l rhdh.redhat.com/app=backstage-developer-hub -w

2. Once the pod is running, verify all plugins loaded successfully:

   oc exec deployment/backstage-developer-hub -n rhdh -- \
     curl -s http://localhost:7007/api/dynamic-plugins/loaded | \
     jq '.plugins[] | select(.name | contains("ansible")) | .name'
   ## Expected output:
   ## "ansible-backstage-plugin-auth-backend-module-rhaap-provider"
   ## "ansible.plugin-backstage-rhaap"
   ## "ansible.plugin-backstage-self-service"
   ## "ansible.plugin-scaffolder-backend-module-backstage-rhaap"
   ## "ansible-backstage-plugin-catalog-backend-module-rhaap"

3. Get the route URL to access Developer Hub: 

   RHDH_URL=$(oc get route backstage-developer-hub -n rhdh -o jsonpath='https://{.spec.host}')
   echo "Access RHDH at: $RHDH_URL"

Congratulations! You have successfully deployed Red Hat Developer Hub with Ansible Automation Platform integrations. Developer Hub is now capable of synchronizing with your Ansible Automation Platform catalog, managing user identities via the Red Hat build of Keycloak, and executing complex software templates.