Chapter 2. New features and enhancements

With this update, the dsc binary is available for users with a Mac on 64-bit ARM processors such as Apple M1 to connect to an OpenShift instance and deploy or administer Dev Spaces.

With this update, OpenShift Dev Spaces supports multiple postStart events in devfiles.

schemaVersion: 2.1.0
metadata:
  name: multi-post-start
components:
  - name: tools
    container:
      image: quay.io/devfile/universal-developer-image
commands:
  - id: first-command
    exec:
      component: tools
      commandLine: "echo first command"
  - id: second-command
    exec:
      component: tools
      commandLine: "echo second command"
events:
  postStart:
    - first-command
    - second-command

This enhancement introduces an Events tab in the Starting workspace screen where you can view live Kubernetes events and troubleshoot workspace startup problems.

With this update, the default registry for extensions for Microsoft Visual Studio Code - Open Source is the embedded OpenVSX registry, which is included in the devfile registry container. Before this update, the default was the public registry at https://open-vsx.org.

Administrators have two possible methods for changing this configuration:

With this update, if your organization uses OAuth or you have set up a personal access token (PAT), Git configuration automatically retrieves the correct user data. This way, you can run git commit without needing to configure Git first.

With this update, OpenShift Dev Spaces supports OAuth 2.0, as well as OAuth 1.0, for Bitbucket Server.

As of this release, some previously hard-coded values in the CheCluster Custom Resource have moved to the Operator, so they can be updated automatically when new versions of OpenShift Dev Spaces are released. Default values have also changed in this release, as follows:

This enhancement introduces a command Dev Spaces: Restart Workspace from Local Devfile for the Microsoft Visual Studio Code - Open Source editor. You can use this command to update the workspace definition after modifying the devfile in the editor.

With this update, the workspace-starting sequence is optimized to start with Checking for the limit of running workspaces. This enhancement saves users time when attempting to start a workspace and exceeding an administrator-configured workspace limit.

With this update, you can add an image parameter for the path to a container image as part of a URL for starting a new workspace in some situations:

You can use the following URL syntax with this parameter:

https://devspaces-<openshift_deployment_name>.<domain_name>/f?url=<git_repository_url>&image=<url_to_custom_developer_image>

With this update, Dockerfile build capabilities are enabled by default for new installations. Administrators can opt out of the feature by setting spec.devEnvironments.disableBuildCapabilities to true.

With this update, a menu item is introduced in Microsoft Visual Code Studio - Open Source to access the OpenShift web console directly from the IDE.

With this update, if the Git service of the repository URL is not supported, you can start a workspace using the default devfile instead. This feature is intended for Git services other than GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Microsoft Azure Repos.

With this update, the Microsoft Visual Studio Code - Open Source command Create New Terminal to DevWorkspace Container is renamed to Create New Terminal (Select a Container). Additionally, the command is added to the Terminal menu and the terminal context menu.

With this update, a widget is introduced to warn users if automatic revoke for the Git provider is unavailable.

With this update, the IDE starts by attaching a postStart lifecycle handler. User-specified commands are therefore not overridden when you start the IDE.

With this update, the DevWorkspace Operator uses projected volumes when multiple automatically mounted config maps or secrets use the same mount path.

With this update, the DevWorkspace Operator supports configuring access mode for files automatically mounted from config maps and secrets via an annotation.

With this update, the ~/.kube/config file, which is generated at workspace startup with the user’s credentials, also includes the user’s "namespace" as a "context" for possible in-workspace tools that use the Kubernetes API.

With this update, administrators can configure the ServiceAccount token mounted in workspace Pods as a projected ServiceAccount token. This enhancement enables administrators to set the audience, mountPath, and expirationSeconds of the token and enables federation such as GCP workload identity federation. Administrators can specify projected tokens properties in a CheCluster CR:

spec:
  devEnvironments:
    serviceAccountTokens:
      - name: <name>
        mounthPath: <absolute_path_in_the_container>
        audience: <audience>
        expirationSeconds: <positive_integer>
        path: <path_relative_to_the_mountpath>