18F’s flagship website

This repository houses the 18F website. We use the U.S. Web Design System for the front end interface. The site is built and served through the Federalist platform.

Style and style guide

18f.gsa.gov extends the U.S. Web Design System and 18F Brand guidelines to create a style that is professional, unique, and informative. The style guide, located at 18f.gsa.gov/styleguide/ documents the patterns and components used to create this theme.

View style guide

History

A detailed history of the past work that went into developing this redesign can be found at 18F/beta.18f.gov.

Installation and Deployment

Note: The Federalist platform does not support the use of a predefined SHOME environment variable which impacts the installation of the site's testing dependency pry (See the issue). In order to build the Federalist deployment and keep the tests working in CI, a Federalist specific gemfile (GemfileFederalist) was created to exclude the testing and development groups during install. The Federalist script in the package.json is run during the build time a creates a bundler config to install the GemfileFederalist dependencies and not the default Gemfile. Any updates to the production builds Gemfile should be included in the GemfileFederalist until a better fix is in place for the pry dependency or the Federalist platform.

Run each of the following steps to get the site up and running.

1. git clone git@github.com:18F/18f.gsa.gov
2. cd 18f.gsa.gov
3. bundle install
4. ./serve

To dramatically reduce the build time, there are two commands that you can run instead of ./serve:

• ./serve-fast: This will eliminate all of the blog posts and the search index, but generates all other pages
• ./serve-blog: This will eliminate all but the latest three blog posts, but keeps the rest of the site intact.

You should be able to see the site at: http://127.0.0.1:4000/site/

Alternative Installation using Docker

Using Docker can make dependencies management easier, but can also slow down your build time. You can find out more in this discussion.

To try this out on MacOS:

1. Install Docker Toolbox.
2. Make sure Docker is running and cd into your project folder.
3. Run docker-compose build to build the docker image and its dependencies. You only need to build once, but if there was an error with the build , rebuild using the --no-cache option like so docker-compose build --no-cache to avoid using the old version of the docker image.
4. Run docker-compose up. Note: if you want to run a single command and bypass your Dockerfile for debugging purposes, you can do like so docker-compose run app <COMMAND> (for instance, you can run bundle docker-compose run app bundle install). Our site is large, so this could take awhile. Specifically this command will hang on jekyll_pages_api_search: checking for Node.js for upwards of 30 minutes on first run.
5. Visit http://localhost:4000/site/ in your browser. Make sure that you include the trailing slash.

Testing

When adding a new tag in a blog post's tags key, you may need to add the new tag to the tests in the /tests/schema/tags.yml list. Note, this only applies to tags that have not already been added to the tag list.

System security controls

The site is a static website with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Deployments are done through Federalist.

1. Federalist runs in its own organization and space in cloud.gov, which piggybacks on AWS GovCloud.
2. Federalist Admin: https://federalist.18f.gov/.
3. Federalist responds to a webhook on GitHub and runs Jekyll to generate static web files and puts them in an S3 bucket.
4. We map 18f.gsa.gov URL to the S3 bucket.