Platform Engineer Activity: Template to Setup Dev Environment

When developers are assigned a JIRA/task/feature to enhance an application, they begin with a feature-branch on Git. Developers will continue to work on this feature-branch till the time they are ready to merge their changes to the main branch. Creating an isolated dev environment for these developers to help in in a continuous inner-loop, helps to accelerate developer productivity.

The Platform Engineer creates a new S/W template that can setup an isolated dev environment for the Developers, who are in this case working on the parasol-store application. The template performs a number of things:

  • Creates a namespace within OpenShift for the developer

  • This isolated dev environment connects to the developer DB instance running on OpenShift

  • Sets up a development pipelines to make development easy

  • Creates GitOps/Argo manifests within the user’s repo

With this, the Platform Engineers are able to provide this environment that allows the developer to just focus on coding. The templates make it easy for developers to set up isolated dev environments repeatedly in a self-service fashion, thereby rapidly increased developer productivity.

Login as Platform Engineer

  • You will perform this activity as a Platform Engineer.

    • Logout from Developer Hub

      Click to see how to logout

      • Navigate to the Settings side-menu of Developer Hub and click on the kebab menu in the Profile card

        Settings of Red Hat Developer Hub

      • Sign out of Red Hat Developer Hub using the Settings screen as shown.

        Signing out of Red Hat Developer Hub

    • Logout from Gitlab

      Click to see how to logout

      • Click on the Profile icon, and Sign out from the dropdown.

        Signing out of Red Hat Developer Hub

  • Login to Red Hat Developer Hub and GitLab as pe1/{common_password}

Create parasol-store Dev Template

  • On Developer Hub, choose Create menu on the left-hand, and choose Register Existing Component.

  • Create a template by pasting this template URL into the URL textbox

    https://gitlab-gitlab.{openshift_cluster_ingress_domain}/rhdh/parasol-store-dev-template/-/blob/main/template.yaml

  • Click on Analyze button followed by clicking the Import button to import the template.

  • The Template will start appearing in the Create side-menu

    parasol store dev template create