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Lightspeed Installation and Configuration

Overview

Red Hat Developer Hub Lightspeed provides AI-powered developer assistance through an integrated chat interface, offering contextual help with code, documentation, and workflow guidance. The Lightspeed flavour bundles all required plugins and configurations to enable this AI-assisted experience.

What's Included

The Lightspeed flavour (as of v1.10) consists of the following dynamic plugins:

Lightspeed Core:

  • backstage-plugin-lightspeed - Frontend UI with chat interface, floating action button, and drawer components
  • backstage-plugin-lightspeed-backend - Backend services for AI processing

Prerequisites

To use Lightspeed, you need:

  • Red Hat Developer Hub 1.10 or later
  • Access to any LLM of your choosing (which you set up in the Llama Stack config.yaml configuration)

Enabling Lightspeed

Using the Flavour (Recommended)

Starting from version 1.10, RHDH includes Lightspeed as an enabled-by-default flavour. For new deployments, Lightspeed is automatically active (the requisite containers are running) but inert (there is a Secret which must be updated with sufficient metadata to interact with a LLM for which you have access):

apiVersion: rhdh.redhat.com/v1alpha5
kind: Backstage
metadata:
  name: my-backstage
spec: {}

To explicitly enable Lightspeed:

spec:
  flavours:
    - name: lightspeed
      enabled: true

To disable Lightspeed:

spec:
  flavours:
    - name: lightspeed
      enabled: false

Or disable all default flavours:

spec:
  flavours: []

Manual Plugin Configuration

If you prefer to configure plugins manually without using the flavour, refer to the dynamic plugins ConfigMap:

includes:
  - dynamic-plugins.default.yaml
plugins:
  - package: oci://ghcr.io/redhat-developer/rhdh-plugin-export-overlays/red-hat-developer-hub-backstage-plugin-lightspeed:bs_1.45.3__1.2.3
    disabled: false
  - package: oci://ghcr.io/redhat-developer/rhdh-plugin-export-overlays/red-hat-developer-hub-backstage-plugin-lightspeed-backend:bs_1.45.3__1.2.3
    disabled: false

For more information about configuring dynamic plugins, please refer to the Configuration documentation.

Configuration

Backend Authentication

The Lightspeed backend requires authentication configuration to connect to your LLM. Configure this through environment variables or app-config:

spec:
  application:
    extraEnvs:
      secrets:
        - name: lightspeed-credentials

Ensure the secret contains the necessary authentication keys for AI service access.

UI Customization

The Lightspeed chat interface appears as:

  • A floating action button (FAB) in the bottom-right corner
  • A drawer panel that slides in from the right
  • Mount points at various locations in the application

These UI elements are configured through the plugin's pluginConfig and can be customized in the dynamic plugins configuration.

Features

AI Chat Interface:

  • Contextual assistance for code development
  • Documentation navigation and search
  • Workflow guidance and best practices
  • Natural language queries about the software catalog

Usage

Once enabled, users can:

  1. Click the Lightspeed floating button to open the chat interface
  2. Ask questions about code, documentation, or workflows

Notes

  • Starting with version 1.10, Lightspeed is enabled by default for all RHDH deployments, including new installs and upgrades of existing instances.
  • The flavour includes all necessary UI components and backend services

For more information about the Flavour-based configuration system, see the Configuration documentation.

Syncing Upstream Lightspeed Configs

Note

This syncing functionality is intended for use by maintainers of the Lightspeed flavour for RHDH.

The Lightspeed flavour vendors configuration files from the upstream redhat-ai-dev/lightspeed-configs repository. A sync script is provided to fetch the latest versions of these files and update the operator tree in place.

What Gets Synced

The script fetches four files from the upstream repository and writes them into two local targets:

Upstream path Local target Content
llama-stack-configs/config.yaml config/profile/rhdh/default-config/flavours/lightspeed/configmap-files.yaml Llama Stack server configuration
lightspeed-core-configs/lightspeed-stack.yaml (same ConfigMap file, different YAML document) Lightspeed Core stack configuration
lightspeed-core-configs/rhdh-profile.py (same ConfigMap file, different YAML document) RHDH prompt profile
env/default-values.env examples/lightspeed.yaml Secret key scaffolding

Running the Script

Sync from the default upstream branch (main):

./hack/sync-lightspeed-configs.sh

Syncing from a Release Branch or Tag

Use the --ref flag to sync from a specific branch, tag, or commit:

./hack/sync-lightspeed-configs.sh --ref release-1.10

This is useful when preparing a release and the operator needs to pin its vendored configs to a stable upstream ref rather than main.

If the upstream content has not changed, the script prints already up to date and leaves the files untouched.