Software Collections

The latest, stable updates of development technologies for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Overview

When developing applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), developers have two major toolchains to choose from:

  1. There is a set of tools (known as base tools) delivered within RHEL which includes Python, GCC, PHP, Ruby, Perl, and much more. These tools have the same support life cycle as RHEL - up to ten years. To maintain compatibility, the major versions of these tools are fixed at the time of the "dot-zero" release of RHEL. If you want a toolchain that’s supported for 10 years, then use these.

  2. Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) are for developers looking for continually updated tools such as the latest stable versions of dynamic languages, open source databases, web infrastructure, and other essential development tools.

RHSCL releases occur semi-annually. The collections have a two to three-year support life cycle to allow for rapid innovation without sacrificing stability. RHSCL is available with supported RHEL 6 and 7 subscriptions, all RHEL developer subscriptions, and the no-cost RHEL Developer subscription.  In addition to RHEL, many of the collections with Linux containers are also available on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and more.

Software collections allow you to concurrently install multiple versions of the same software components on your system. Packages built as a software collection do not overwrite the versions (base tools) included with RHEL.

Building applications in Linux containers.

Many RHSCL collections are available with dockerfiles, but are also distributed as full Linux container images that can be obtained from the Red Hat Container Catalog. This makes it easy to build and deploy applications in Linux containers that use RHSCL components. 

The dockerfiles used to build the RHSCL container images are provided as RHSCL RPMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. These source dockerfiles can be used for building containers with customized RHSCL components.

The Portfolio

RHSCL includes many popular developer resources. Here are a few of the latest versions:

  • Databases (learn about syspaths with some of these}

    • MariaDB 10.3
    • MongoDB 3.6
    • MySQL 8.0
    • PostgreSQL 10
    • Redis 5

  • Web and application servers and HTTP accelerators

    • Apache httpd 2.4.34
    • nginx 1.18.0
    • Phusion Passenger 4.0
    • Varnish Cache 6.0

  • Complementary development tools

    • Git 2.27.0
    • Maven 3.5
    • IDE
    • Eclipse IDE 4.7

For the full list of collections see the latest RHSCL Release Notes, and here for their respective life cycles.

Compiler toolsets. If you are looking for the latest stable versions of compilers, see Red Hat Developer Toolset (DTS) for the C++ GNU Compiler Collection, GDB, and numerous analysis/debugging tools.  Additional compiler toolsets are available for Clang/LLVM, Go, and Rust.

Try Red Hat Software Collections today

Follow our RHSCL get started guides to try Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Need a subscription? Developers can get a no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription by registering and downloading through developers.redhat.com.