GOV.UK Frontend

Application to serve mainstream formats, the homepage, and search vertical for the GOV.UK single domain.

Live examples

Formats

• https://www.gov.uk/benefit-cap (answer)
• https://www.gov.uk/britainisgreat (campaign)
• https://www.gov.uk/becoming-a-british-citizen (guide)
• https://www.gov.uk/settle-in-the-uk (simple smart answer)
• https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote (transaction start page)
• https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/afghanistan (foreign travel advice country page)
• https://www.gov.uk/help/cookies (help page)

Hard-coded routes

• https://www.gov.uk/search?q=cabinet+office (search results page)
• https://www.gov.uk/ (homepage)
• https://www.gov.uk/tour (tour of GOV.UK)
• https://www.gov.uk/help (help index page)
• https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice (travel advice index page)

Nomenclature

• Formats - our phrase for a type of content

Technical documentation

A Ruby on Rails application that renders the citizen-facing part of formats stored in the Content API. It looks up the passed in slug in the Content API.

It also serves the homepage (hard-coded route) and the search results vertical (hard-coded route).

See app/views/root for some bespoke transaction start pages.

Dependencies

• alphagov/static - provides shared templates, styles, and JavaScript
• alphagov/govuk_content_api - provides raw data for rendering formats
• alphagov/panopticon - (optionally) registers the application with Panoption

Running the application

To run the application standalone, run static and execute the following command:

PLEK_SERVICE_STATIC_URI=http://127.0.0.1:3013 PLEK_SERVICE_CONTENTAPI_URI=https://www.gov.uk/api ./startup.sh

which uses the production content API and a local copy of static.

To run in a full development stack (with DNS, all apps running etc.) just use ./startup.sh.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rake runs the test suite.

JavaScript unit testing

The tests in test/javascripts will be run as part of the test:javascript task.

To run them in a browser on your local machine (useful for breakpointing):

1. run INCLUDE_JS_TEST_ASSETS=1 bundle exec script/rails server -p 3150 --environment=test on your vm
2. open test/javascripts/support/LocalTestRunner.html (as a static file) in your browser.

This relies on you being able to access the above server on http://www.dev.gov.uk:3150.

Licence

MIT Licence