Red Hat just made three big changes to its developer hub – here’s what you need to know

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published 4 April 2025

Red Hat has unveiled a raft of upgrades for Red Hat Developer Hub (RDHD), including support for a local version as well as new analytics.

First announced in May 2023, Red Hat Developer Hub is the company's internal portal designed to help streamline the developer process.

Based on Backstage, an open source framework for building developer portals from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, RHDH is the enterprise grade version designed to pull together curated tools and other resources into a single place.

The updated version, RHDH 1.5, is available immediately, though some of the additions remain developer previews.

The company said that organizations are prioritizing AI and edge applications, but noted these can be complicated and time consuming to develop. As a result, the firm is keen to push for wider adoption of internal developer portals, which can help streamline development and productivity.

"As organizations turn to intelligent applications to gain a competitive advantage, streamlining development processes and maximising productivity is imperative to getting these applications into production faster," said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of developer tools at Red Hat.

"The latest features in Red Hat Developer Hub are designed to not only help organisations increase adoption and efficiency, but also allow for a more tailored portal, providing developers direct access to the tools, templates and components they need to drive innovation," Sivasubramanian added.

So what can users expect from the new updates? Here’s everything you need to know.

Red Hat targets deeper dev insights

Red Hat noted that it's not always easy to understand how a developer portal is being used — if at all.

That's the motivation behind Adoption Insights, a new analytical dashboard plugin that shows how development teams make use of RDHD.

The dashboard tracks active users, total users, and portal searches, as well as the top catalog entities such as APIs, templates, documentation entries, and plugins.

Adoption Insights is available now as a developer preview with installation instructions here.

Red Hat Developer Hub Extensions Catalog

Another new feature in RHDH version 1.5 is a collection of plugins that have been verified by Red Hat or the community.

The RHDH Extensions Catalog features over 60 dynamic plugins, viewable through a streamlined interface, to offer greater control but also flexibility inside the portal.

Teams can manage plugins, including their own custom ones, at runtime, without rebuilding and redeploying the portal. Red Hat said this will help teams speed up the process to onboard new tools.

"No two organizations approach application development in the same manner and as such, they need access to tailored and curated tools and components that best meets the unique needs of their platform engineers," the company said in a statement.

RHDH Local

The third, major change to RHDH is a local development tool. Like the name suggests, RHDH Local lets platform engineers run a lightweight, self-contained version of RHDH on their own local machine to let them get to work faster and troubleshoot changes before deploying to a production system.

"With RHDH Local, users can work on templates, try out plugins, validate software catalogues and more, without having to install Red Hat Developer Hub on a Kubernetes cluster," the company said in a statement.

"Additionally, because it runs in a containerized environment, users can spin up RHDH Local in seconds and tear it down just as quickly."

Last year, Red Hat bundled RHDH together with Trusted Artifact Signer and Trusted Profile Analyzer to create Red Hat Trusted Application Pipeline, for security-focused development templates.