Workshop Overview

Your role and mission

You are a platform engineer at a product team evaluating Red Hat Developer Hub as the internal developer portal for your organization.

Your GitLab instance already hosts application repositories, but developers lack a single place to discover services, run self-service templates, read documentation, and understand ownership. Leadership wants a portal that integrates with GitLab and grows with advanced capabilities such as RBAC, TechDocs, Orchestrator, and CI/CD visibility.

Your assignment: Install and configure Red Hat Developer Hub on OpenShift with GitLab integration, then enable the features your teams need for day-to-day development.

The objective: A working Red Hat Developer Hub instance where users authenticate with GitLab, the catalog discovers repositories and teams, and optional modules extend the platform with templates, plugins, documentation, and automation.

Project challenges

The situation: Teams store code in GitLab but onboarding is manual. There is no standard way to scaffold components, publish TechDocs, or enforce who can run self-service actions.

Current pain points:

  • Discovery — Repositories are hard to find without a central catalog

  • Identity — No unified sign-in aligned with GitLab users and groups

  • Governance — Self-service actions need role-based restrictions

  • Documentation — Technical docs are scattered outside the portal

The opportunity: Red Hat Developer Hub provides a Backstage-based portal with dynamic plugins, GitLab integration, and enterprise options for HA, monitoring, and external databases.

Success criteria

By the end of this workshop, you will have:

  • Deployed Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10 on OpenShift 4.21

  • Configured GitLab authentication and catalog autodiscovery

  • Applied RBAC policies and imported software templates

  • Extended the portal with dynamic plugins, TechDocs, High-Availability, monitoring, and notifications

  • Explored Orchestrator, AI enabled (MCP and Developer Lightspeed), use of an external database, and CI/CD integrations

Target audience

This workshop is designed for:

  • Platform engineers and cluster administrators installing Red Hat Developer Hub

  • Developer experienced teams evaluating internal developer portals

  • Developers who want hands-on experience with Red Hat Developer Hub and its integration capabilities

Prerequisites

You should have:

  • cluster-admin access on an OpenShift 4.21 cluster

  • Familiarity with oc, ConfigMaps, Secrets, and the Backstage custom resource

  • A clone of this repository (or raw URLs from your GitLab fork)