Chapter 2. New features and enhancements

With this release, the administrator can configure Secrets, ConfigMaps, and PersistentVolumesClaims that will be replicated in the namespaces of all users. You can therefore share certificates, secrets, and configuration files across all the users.

For example, creating the following ConfigMap makes Mavensettings.xml file available in the Container Development Environment (CDE) of all the users:

kind: ConfigMap
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
  name: user-settings-xml
  namespace: {prod-namespace}
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/part-of: che.eclipse.org
    app.kubernetes.io/component: workspaces-config
  annotations:
    controller.devfile.io/mount-as: subpath
    controller.devfile.io/mount-path: /home/user/.m2
data:
  settings.xml: |
    <settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
      <localRepository>/home/user/.m2/repository</localRepository>
      <interactiveMode>true</interactiveMode>
      <offline>false</offline>
    </settings>

Find more about the procedure in the official documentation.

With this release, you can use pod and container overrides for volumes and volumeMounts in the Devfile definition.

For example, you can add a CSI volume with the SharedSecret to a pod or container in the Container Development Environment (CDE):

schemaVersion: 2.2.2
attributes:
  controller.devfile.io/storage-type: per-workspace
metadata:
  name: pod-overrides-example
  attributes:
    pod-overrides:
      spec:
        volumes:
          - csi:
              driver: csi.sharedresource.openshift.io
              readOnly: true
              volumeAttributes:
                sharedSecret: my-share
            name: my-csi-volume
components:
- name: workspace
  attributes:
    container-overrides:
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /etc/my-csi-volume
           name: my-csi-volume
           readOnly: true
  container:
    ...

With this release, you can not start workspace based on SSH URLs until you configure the SSH keys in the User Dashboard:

https://github.com/eclipse/che/assets/1461122/6b0f1eba-8184-49fc-8411-9810d762d62b

Previously, the Che-Code editor failed to start in the Red Hat Universal Base Image 9. With this release, this issue is fixed and you can now explicitly reference those images in the components section of a devfile:

schemaVersion: 2.2.2
metadata:
  name: ubi9-minimal-demo
components:
  - name: tools
    container:
      image: registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9-minimal:9.3-1552@sha256:582e18f13291d7c686ec4e6e92d20b24c62ae0fc72767c46f30a69b1a6198055
      args: ['tail', '-f', '/dev/null']
      endpoints:
        - exposure: public
          name: nodejs
          protocol: http
          targetPort: 3000
      memoryLimit: 2Gi
      memoryRequest: 256Mi
      mountSources: true
    attributes:
      controller.devfile.io/merge-contribution: true

Starting from this release, you can configure the number of replicas for operands using HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA):

apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: scaler
  namespace: {operator-namespace}
spec:
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: Deployment
    name: __<deployment_name>__
  ...

The <deployment_name> in the snippet above corresponds to one of the following deployments: * che-server * che-gateway * dashboard * plugin-registry * devfile-registry

Find more details about the HPA setup in the official documentation.

By default, the Universal Developer Image (UDI) contains Podman and Buildah which you can use to build and push container images within a Cloud Development Environment (CDE). However, Podman and Buildah in the UDI are configured to use the vfs storage driver which does not provide copy-on-write support. For more efficient image management, you can use the fuse-overlayfs storage driver which supports copy-on-write in rootless environments.

Find more details about fuse-overlayfs configuration in the official documentation.

With this release, you can override the editor’s image using a dedicated URL parameter when starting a Cloud Development Environment. Here are some examples:

Find more details about the editor-image URL parameter in the official documentation.