Che: Give more flexibility on where devfile registry can served up

[makandre]

Description

I would like to make devfiles I have on GitHub show up in Che dashboard when creating a workspace.

I learned that I can configure Che's devfile registry by changing the che.workspace.devfile_registry_url property.

It would be great if I can change it so the devfiles can be served up directly from GitHub (e.g. set che.workspace.devfile_registry_url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kabanero-io/codewind-templates/master/)

But this doesn't work; Che takes the url and does a GET on <url>/devfiles/ to get the contents of the index.json (and obviously that won't work for GitHub). If it simply does a GET on <url>/devfiles/index.json instead, then I believe it would work. (it would be a small change here https://github.com/eclipse/che/blob/master/dashboard/src/components/api/devfile-registry.factory.ts#L46)

Reproduction Steps

OS and version:

Diagnostics:

[tobespc]

I'm trying to get that to work by submitting a PR against che to pretty much suggest what you have said

[l0rd]

Based on the PR discussion https://github.com/eclipse/che/pull/13645#issuecomment-510093281 I would +1 to set milestone 7.0.0 and merge the PR
@nickboldt @tsmaeder @rhopp @slemeur

[nickboldt]

+1, added to che7GA and milestone 7.0.0.

[makandre]

Thank you!

[slemeur]

@makandre : As the PR been merged, is this issue solved?

[makandre]

Hi @slemeur, for my usage I'm packaging a custom assembly where I change the che.workspace.devfile_registry_url value to point to my repo with the index.json

So I have been using 7.0.0-RC-3.0-SNAPSHOT as the base che assembly, however it doesn't appear to contain the fix yet. Am I using the right version? Is there another version I should be using which contains the fix? Thanks.

[slemeur]

Thanks for your answer @makandre !
The fix has been merged yesterday, so you should pull the latest snapshot of RC 3.
How and where are you deploying Che?

[makandre]

I just built again with 7.0.0-RC-3.0-SNAPSHOT but it still does not have the fix

[makandre]

Will there be 7.0.0-RC-4.0 images?

[amisevsk]

I believe we are currently on 7.0.0-rc-4.0-SNAPSHOT, rc-3.0 was released a few weeks ago and is not taking current commits (I think @slemeur mistyped)

However, if all you are doing to modify the assembly is setting che.workspace.devfile_registry_url, this can be done in the current eclipse/che-server:nightly image by setting the environment variable

CHE_WORKSPACE_DEVFILE__REGISTRY__URL

in the container. Generally properties can be overriden at runtime via env vars using the translation '_' -> '__'; '.' -> '_'; toUppercase().

[tobespc]

we have tested the master branch and can see it in there ok

[makandre]

@amisevsk Thanks for the clarification. I'm able to verify it works now.

[amisevsk]

@makandre No problem, happy to help! There's a little more information in an (old, but still valid) doc: https://www.eclipse.org/che/docs/che-6/properties.html#properties-and-environment-variables

[slemeur]

Excellent! Thanks @amisevsk for following-up !