Calculate teacher pay

School teachers and leaders in England can use this service to see how their salary could change following the 2023 pay award.

This repository contains the source code and infrastructure definitions for the 'Calculate teacher pay' service, a minimalistic Ruby on Rails application.

Important: As of March 2024, this service is not active anymore.

If you are resuming work on this repo after a period of service inactivity, please make sure the project receives any outstanding updates and that it is deployable by contacting the Ops team.

Local development setup

After cloning the repository, cd into the folder and install the dependencies with:

$ yarn install
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec foreman start

Finally, visit: http://127.0.0.1:3000/

Testing

To run the unit test suite locally:

$ bundle exec rspec

To perform manual testing against the hosted development enviornment, e.g. when testing a dependency update, follow the instructions below (see Deployment).

Please note: the hosted development environment is deployed with RAILS_ENV=production.

Deployment

There currently are two hosted environments in AKS, development and production, and the respective urls are:

• https://development.calculate-teacher-pay.education.gov.uk/
• https://calculate-teacher-pay.education.gov.uk/

Every merge to main will trigger a deployment to development and production via a Github Actions workflow.

In some circumstances, you may need to trigger a manual deployment to development first, e.g. to test a new feature before it's ready for release.

Manual deployment using Github Actions workflow

To trigger a manual deployment, you can use the Github Actions workflow "Deploy to AKS (Manual)", specifying:

• a target docker image tag (main by default)
• the target environment (development or production)

To build the docker image locally and push it to the repo's docker registry, you can follow these steps:

$ export DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG=`git rev-parse --verify HEAD`
$ docker buildx build --platform linux/amd64 --output type=docker . \
  -t ghcr.io/dfe-digital/teacher-pay-calculator:$DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG
$ docker push ghcr.io/dfe-digital/teacher-pay-calculator:$DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG

To authenticate with the registry, make sure you are added to it and follow the instructions at https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-packages-registry/working-with-the-container-registry#authenticating-with-a-personal-access-token-classic

Manual deployment using make

As an alternative, you can trigger a manual deployment using make:

$ make development terraform-apply DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG=xxx
$ make production terraform-apply DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG=xxx

where DOCKER_IMAGE_TAG is an environment variable exported as above.

** CAVEATS **

• You can use the same workflow to deploy to production, although you should use the deployment via pipeline approach; in other words, simply merge to main when a branch/PR is ready to go to production
• The current setup relies on a Personal Github Token created by one of the current maintainers of the project and added to the s189t01-ctp-dv-inf-kv and s189p01-ctp-pd-inf-kv keyvaults; this is not ideal, but it was necessary to keep the repository public while we were doing the first and initial testing of new salary figures that couldn't be disclosed to the public until an official government announcement
• The Personal Github Token should have an expiration date and refreshed before completely expiring, otherwise the currently deployed pods won't be able to restart and fetch the docker image, potentially leading to unplanned downtime
• The development environment is protected with Basic auth; the credentials can be found in the s189t01-ctp-dv-inf-kv keyvault.

Custom domains

The calculate-teacher-pay.education.gov.uk and development.calculate-teacher-pay.education.gov.uk domains are set up by terraform, using Azure DNS and Azure front door. The certificates are generated by front door and rotated automatically.

However, calculate-teacher-pay.education.gov.uk (the apex domain) must be revalidated every 180 days or it will expire. A StatusCake monitor will alert 30 days before expiry. When it happens follow the revalidation process.

Monitoring

Sentry is configured for both hosted environments and alerts will be sent to the #claim_tech Slack channel as well as to the project team members.

StatusCake is also configured to check against the /healthcheck endpoint, and the alerts will be sent to the #claim_tech Slack channel as well as to the email and/or mobile phone number lists added to the Teacher payments contact group.