GOV.UK Notify – Technical Documentation

Getting started

Docker container

In order to make local development easy, we run app commands through a Docker container. Run the following to set this up:

make bootstrap-with-docker

Because the container caches things like packages, you will need to run this again if you change the package versions.

To run the application

make run-with-docker

If all goes well something like the following output will be displayed:

== The Middleman is loading
== LiveReload accepting connections from ws://192.168.0.8:35729
== View your site at "http://Laptop.local:4567", "http://192.168.0.8:4567"
== Inspect your site configuration at "http://Laptop.local:4567/__middleman", "http://192.168.0.8:4567/__middleman"

You should now be able to view a live preview at http://localhost:4567.

Making changes

To make changes edit the source files in the source folder.

Although a single page of HTML is generated the markdown is spread across multiple files to make it easier to manage. They can be found in source/documentation.

A new markdown file isn't automatically included in the generated output. If we add a new markdown file at the location source/documentation/agile/scrum.md, the following snippet in source/index.html.md.erb, includes it in the generated output.

<%= partial 'documentation/agile/scrum' %>

Including files manually like this lets us specify the position they appear in the page.

Deployment

The tech docs are built and deployed in a Concourse pipeline, using a container image built from the Dockerfile in the docker directory.

When running locally we use the ruby_build target, which runs the app using the Middleman server. When running in preview or production (the app is not deployed in staging) we use the production target which runs with NGINX.

Licence

Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT licence.

The data is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.