Devfile ecosystem

Create, Share and Consume Devfiles

Organizations looking to standardize their development environment can do so by adopting devfiles. In the simplest case, developers can just consume the devfiles that are available from the public community registry. If your organization needs custom devfiles that are authored and shared internally, then you need a role based approach so developers, devfile authors, and registry administrators can interact together.

Create

A devfile author, also known as a runtime provider, can be an individual or a group representing a runtime vendor. Devfile authors need sound knowledge of the supported runtime so they can create devfiles to build and run applications.

If a runtime stack is not available in the public registry, an organization can choose to develop their own and keep it private for their in-house development.

Share

The public community registry is managed by the community and hosted by Red Hat. Share your devfile to the public community registry so other teams can benefit from your application.

If an organization wants to keep their own devfiles private but wishes to share with other departments, they can assign a registry administrator. The registry administrator deploys, maintains, and manages the contents of their private registry and the default list of devfile registries available in a given cluster.

Consume

Developers can use the supported tools to access devfiles. Many of the existing tools offer a way to register or catalog public and private devfile registries which then allows the tool to expose the devfiles for development.

In addition, each registry comes packaged with an index server and a registry viewer so developers can browse and view the devfile contents before deciding which ones they want to adopt.

Developers can also extend an existing parent devfile to customize the workflow of their specific application. The devfile can be packaged as part of the application source to ensure consistent behavior when moving across different tools.