🔄 📁 Automation to synchronise updates from a template repository to all associated repositories. Enhances maintainability, consistency and governance across the NHS England's GitHub projects.
The Update from Template App is a powerful GitHub App and Action designed to propagate changes made in a template repository to all repositories created from it. This action is particularly beneficial for maintaining consistency across multiple repositories, which were initially set up using the template repository in the NHS England GitHub organisations. This ensures that improvements, fixes or any updates to the template repository are automatically synchronised across all linked repositories, enhancing maintainability, ensuring consistency and helping with governance.
By including preferably a one-liner or if necessary a set of clear CLI instructions we improve user experience. This should be a frictionless installation process that works on various operating systems (macOS, Linux, Windows WSL) and handles all the dependencies.
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/nhs-england-tools/repository-template.git
cd nhs-england-tools/repository-templateInstall and configure toolchain dependencies
make configIf this repository is
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/org/repo/branch/install.sh)"The following software packages or their equivalents are expected to be installed
After a successful installation, provide an informative example of how this project can be used. Additional code snippets, screenshots and demos work well in this space. You may also link to the other documentation resources, e.g. the User Guide to demonstrate more use cases and to show more features.
Locally
make docker-build
make docker-test \
REPOSITORY_TEMPLATE=github.com/nhs-england-tools/repository-template \
BRANCH_NAME=main \
REPOSITORY_TO_UPDATE=github.com/nhs-england-tools/update-from-template-app \
GIT_USER_NAME="Update from Template App" \
GIT_USER_EMAIL="update-from-template-app@users.noreply.github.com" \
DRY_RUN=true \
VERBOSE=falseThe C4 model is a simple and intuitive way to create software architecture diagrams that are clear, consistent, scalable and most importantly collaborative. This should result in documenting all the system interfaces, external dependencies and integration points.
Most of the projects are built with customisability and extendability in mind. At a minimum, this can be achieved by implementing service level configuration options and settings. The intention of this section is to show how this can be used. If the system processes data, you could mention here for example how the input is prepared for testing - anonymised, synthetic or live data.
GitHub secret variables
UPDATE_FROM_TEMPLATE_GH_APP_ID: GitHub App IDUPDATE_FROM_TEMPLATE_GH_APP_PK: GitHub App private keyUPDATE_FROM_TEMPLATE_GH_APP_SK_ID: GitHub App commit signing key ID, this belongs to a bot accountUPDATE_FROM_TEMPLATE_GH_APP_SK_CONTENT: GitHub App commit signing key content, this belongs to a bot accountUPDATE_FROM_TEMPLATE_GH_APP_SK_PASSPHRASE: GitHub App commit signing key passphrase, this belongs to a bot account
Describe or link templates on how to raise an issue, feature request or make a contribution to the codebase. Reference the other documentation files, like
- Environment setup for contribution, i.e.
CONTRIBUTING.md - Coding standards, branching, linting, practices for development and testing
- Release process, versioning, changelog
- Backlog, board, roadmap, ways of working
- High-level requirements, guiding principles, decision records, etc.
The LICENCE.md file will need to be updated with the correct year and owner
Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT License. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.
Any HTML or Markdown documentation is © Crown Copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0.