Developer Hub Overview

What is Red Hat Developer Hub?

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade internal developer portal built on the Backstage open source project. It provides a single pane of glass where developers can discover services, create new projects from templates, and access documentation — all without needing to understand the underlying infrastructure.

Why an Internal Developer Portal?

As organizations adopt microservices, GitOps, and platform engineering, developers face increasing complexity: multiple Git repositories, CI/CD tools, deployment targets, and observability platforms. An internal developer portal addresses this by providing:

  • Discoverability — A searchable software catalog of all services, APIs, and infrastructure components

  • Self-service — Golden Path templates that let developers create new projects with all the scaffolding pre-configured

  • Consistency — Every new project follows organizational standards for CI/CD, security, and observability

  • Reduced cognitive load — Developers interact with one portal instead of navigating dozens of tools

Architecture

Developer Hub has several core components:

Software Catalog

A centralized registry of all software components (services, APIs, libraries, infrastructure) in the organization. Each component has an owner, lifecycle stage, and links to its repository, CI pipelines, and documentation.

Golden Path Templates

Parameterized project scaffolds that generate complete, ready-to-deploy projects. A template typically creates a Git repository, CI pipeline, GitOps manifests, devfile, and catalog registration — all in one click.

Plugins

Extend Developer Hub with integrations for external tools. Common plugins include Tekton (pipeline status), Argo CD (deployment status), Topology (OpenShift view), and Dev Spaces (launch workspace).

TechDocs

Documentation-as-code that renders Markdown docs alongside catalog entries. Developers find API documentation, runbooks, and architecture decisions in the same portal where they manage their services.

Key Concepts

Software Catalog Entity

A YAML file (catalog-info.yaml) at the root of a repository that registers the component in the catalog. Defines metadata like name, owner, type, lifecycle, and relationships to other components.

Golden Path Template

A template.yaml that defines parameters (user inputs), steps (actions to execute), and outputs (what gets created). Steps can create repositories, render files from skeletons, register catalog entities, and trigger pipelines.

Plugin

A frontend or backend module that adds functionality to the portal. Red Hat Developer Hub ships with curated plugins for OpenShift ecosystem tools.

How Developer Hub Fits the Software Factory

Developer Hub ties together all the tools from Day 2 into a unified developer experience:

Tool Developer Hub Integration

Dev Spaces

Launch a workspace directly from a catalog component

Tekton

View pipeline runs and status for each component

Argo CD

See deployment status across environments

GitLab

Link to source repositories and merge requests

OpenTelemetry

Access observability dashboards from the component page

A developer’s workflow becomes:

  1. Open Developer Hub

  2. Create a new project from a Golden Path template

  3. Launch a Dev Spaces workspace from the catalog

  4. Write code, push, and watch the pipeline run — all visible in the portal

Next Steps

When you are ready for the hands-on lab, proceed to Cluster Setup to begin Lab 1.