Getting Started

guides-router is a simple utility that forwards requests for 18F guides to the appropriate guide based on the path prefix.

For example, requests to /accessibility are forwarded to the guide on building accessible web applications.

Setup

The get started, clone this project, install the dependencies, and run npm start:

$ git clone git@github.com:18F/guides-router.git
$ npm install
$ npm start

By default, the router will listen on port 8080, so you can access it at http://localhost:8080/. If you want to use a different port, set the PORT variable in your shell or in .env.local

PORT=5000

Tests

To run the tests, run npm test

Adding a site

First, build your guide and deploy it to Federalist. After that, you'll need to add it to the routes.json file here to have it forwarded correctly.

Before you get started, you'll need a "route prefix". This is what will appear after the URL when your guide is visited. For example, if your prefix is dev-environment, your guide will appear at /dev-environment/ and other pages will appear after that, e.g. /dev-environment/environments/.

After you have a guide on Federalist and a route prefix, set the route prefix as you baseurl in your Federalist site's "custom configuration". You can find this under the "Settings" tab in the Federalist dashboard for your site.

baseurl: /dev-environments

Next, add the URL for your site in Federalist's S3 bucket to the routes.json file. This can also be found in the "Settings" tab on your site's Federalist dashboard.

You should have something like this:

"dev-environments": "http://federalist.18f.gov.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/site/18F/dev-environment/"

Once that is done, re-deploy the router and your guide should be forwarded correctly.