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VA.gov CMS

Welcome to the VA.gov CMS git repository README!

We hope everything you need to know about how the VA.gov website and Content Management System works is right here.

If you find any errors in this documentation, please feel free to make an edit and submit a Pull Request!

Thanks,

The VA.gov Team.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
    1. About VA.gov
    2. Contributing
    3. High-Level Architecture
    4. Infrastructure
  2. Developer Info
    1. Getting Started
    2. WEB & CMS Integration
    3. Workflow
    4. Project Conventions
    5. Environments
      1. CI Environments
      2. Local - Lando
      3. BRD Environments
      4. HTTPS
      5. Environment Variables
    6. Testing
    7. Debugging
    8. Code Review
  3. Release & Deployment
    1. The BRD System: Build, Release, Deploy
    2. CMS Release Process
    3. CMS-CI Release Process
  4. Architecture
    1. Overview
    2. Drupal
      1. Content Translation
    3. MetalSmith
    4. Interfaces - API's and Feature Flags
    5. Security
  5. CMS Users
    1. Login / SSOi

Introduction

About VA.gov

The VA.gov website is made possible by a number of different tools and systems. See High-Level Architecture for an overview of all of the components.

This repository contains the source code for the Content Management System (CMS or CMS-API) for VA.gov, running at cms.VA.gov.

Access to the production CMS is restricted with CAG. See Getting Access.

The CMS is built on Drupal 8, using the Composer package management system. See Getting Started.

Contributing

All of the source code used for generating VA.gov is open source, listed under the department-of-veterans-affairs organization on GitHub:

The VFS team deploys all of these apps using a Jenkins server, configured with a private GitHub Repo:

All development on these projects is done via Pull Requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md for our PR policies.

High-Level Architecture

The public website seen at VA.gov is a static site: just HTML, CSS, and images.

The source code used to generate the public site is called vets-website or Front-end or WEB, and is availalble at github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website.

Decoupled Drupal

The codebase in this repository (va.gov-cms) is for the CMS, which is built on Drupal 8. The CMS is not publicly available. It acts as a Content API for the WEB application, and a Content Management System for VA.gov Content Team.

The CMS codebase now includes the WEB codebase as a dependency: the version is set in composer.json. It is downloaded to the ./web folder during composer install.

Build and Release Process

When the content and code updates are ready for release, the WEB Build process is kicked off, it reads content from the CMS via GraphQL (and other locations), and outputs HTML, CSS, and images.

See WEB & CMS Integration for full details on how the WEB and CMS projects work together.

Infrastructure

This section outlines only the systems utilized by the CMS. For information on the WEB project's infrastucture, see .

CMS-CI: Pull Request and Ad-hoc Environments

  • Running OpenDevShop at devshop.cms.va.gov. Access restricted to CAG, sign in with GitHub.
  • A single "mirror" environment is regularly populated with a sanitized production database copy.
  • Open Pull Requests get environments created automatically, cloned from the "mirror" environment, with URLS like pr123.ci.cms.va.gov and a WEB instance built from that PR environment's content, like pr123.web.ci.cms.va.gov.
  • Ad-hoc environments can be created and deleted at any time by any logged in user to devshop.cms.va.gov:
    • Can be named anything and can be set to any branch or Pull Request.
    • These environments will not change or be rebuild unless the creator chooses.
    • Useful for testing and demos outside of the CMS-CI process.
  • Single EC2 Instance: @TODO: List size, storage, etc.

CMS in BRD: Dev, Staging, Production

The VFS Team maintains a system called BRD: Build, Release, Deploy.

The system is powered by Ansible Roles in the VA's "DevOps" repository, located at github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/devops/tree/master/ansible/build/roles/cms

The BRD system builds Amazon server images using Ansible, and tags those images for release along with the source code of CMS.

The VFS team then deploys those images to the dev, staging and production environments inside the VAEC when the release is ready.

See The BRD System: Build, Release, Deploy for more information.