Publisher is the primary content design app for GovUK. It provides the user interface for entering all the key editorial formats and an API so other apps (primarily frontend) can access that data for display. It is intended to work in partnership with Panopticon which manages metadata, slugs, titles, etc.
If you're just interested in running the Publisher locally, with a minimum of interaction with other apps, here's how.
These instructions are out of date. Updates coming soon
guides$ script/console
>> User.create name: "Your name", email: "youremail@example.com", uid: Time.now.to_i, version: 1
panopticon$ rails s -p 3001
guides$ PANOPTICON_URI="http://localhost:3001" bundle exec rails server
There is no UI or automated process for importing the source data for local transactions.
The source data can be downloaded from http://local.direct.gov.uk/Data/local_authority_service_details.CSV.
They can be imported using a rake task:
bundle exec rake local_transactions:import SOURCE=/path/to/local_authority_service_details.CSV