Summary

The install-dynamic-plugins init container in rhdh-developer-hub pods intermittently crashes with a YAML parse error when processing the catalog index extracted from quay.io/rhdh/plugin-catalog-index:1.10.

CI Impact

This is causing RHDH CI to fail across multiple test build types:

• e2e-ocp-helm-nightly — showcase deployment enters CrashLoopBackOff, blocking all Playwright tests
• e2e-ocp-helm (PR checks) — both showcase and showcase-rbac deployments fail, no tests execute

When the init container does not recover within the CI timeout window, the entire test run is lost.

Affected Versions

• Image: quay.io/rhdh-community/rhdh:next (digest: sha256:ee1092787d21d4d357f1a0a983c23071addc707222433cd066e37a0b8982b421)
• Helm chart: quay.io/rhdh/chart:1.10-67-CI
• Catalog index: quay.io/rhdh/plugin-catalog-index:1.10
• Orchestrator infra chart: quay.io/rhdh/orchestrator-infra-chart:1.10-67-CI
• OpenShift: 4.18

Error

yaml.parser.ParserError: while parsing a block mapping
  in "/dynamic-plugins-root/.catalog-index-temp/dynamic-plugins.default.yaml", line 1, column 1
expected <block end>, but found '-'
  in "/dynamic-plugins-root/.catalog-index-temp/dynamic-plugins.default.yaml", line 1495, column 1

Impact

Both showcase and showcase-rbac RHDH deployments enter CrashLoopBackOff during init, preventing any e2e tests from executing. The issue is intermittent — some runs recover after multiple restarts, others do not recover within the CI timeout window.

Reproduction

Observed across multiple Prow CI runs on PR #4258:

• Build 2024507173601546240 — showcase deployment failed, tests did not run (e2e-ocp-helm-nightly)
• Build 2024505717943177216 — both deployments failed (e2e-ocp-helm PR check)
• Build 2024543437524570112 — recovered after retries, tests passed (e2e-ocp-helm-nightly)

Root Cause Hypothesis

The dynamic-plugins.default.yaml extracted from quay.io/rhdh/plugin-catalog-index:1.10 has malformed YAML at line 1495. This may be a build artifact issue in the catalog index image.