How we build and operate products at the Department for Education. This repo is inspired by (and steals shamelessly from) the GDS Way and the Ministry of Justice Technical Guidance.
It's built using the GOV.UK tech-docs-template, and hosted on GOV.UK PaaS.
To preview the site locally, we need to use the terminal.
Install Ruby and Bundler, preferably with a Ruby version manager.
Once you have Ruby and Bundler set up, you can install this project's dependencies by running the following in this directory:
bundleThis will install all required dependencies, including the govuk-tech-docs gem and middleman.
To make changes edit the source files in the source folder. See "Adding a new guidance" page for details.
Whilst writing documentation, run a middleman server to preview how the published version will look in the browser. After saving a change the preview in the browser will automatically refresh.
The preview is only available on our own computer. Others will not be able to access it if they are given the link.
Type the following to start the server:
make server
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.
If you want to preview the site exactly how it is published, you can build the static HTML files locally. It also helps debugging issues by running in verbose mode. Type the following:
make build
This will create a build subfolder in the application folder which contains
the HTML and asset files ready to be published.
To check all hypertext links inside the generated documentation are valid, build first, then run:
make check-links
Make sure to make changes in a branch. Every change should be reviewed in a pull request, no matter how minor, and we've enabled branch protection to enforce this.
Once the pull request is merged, the deploy Github action workflow runs the build and pushes the static site to GOV.UK PaaS.
Every pull request builds a separate review app. It is a unique version of the documentation implementing the changes from the pull request and pushed to GOV.UK PaaS with a unique URL so it can be shared and peer reviewed. The URL is posted in a comment on the pull request.
Any change to the branch is automatically pushed to the review app after a few minutes.
When the pull request is closed or merged, the review app is deleted.
The application is called dfe-technical-guidance and is supported by the Staticfile buildpack . It is deployed in the space
technical-architecture, in the dfe organisation.
The custom domain, SSL certificate and CDN are provided by the technical-guidance cdn-route service.
The deploy workflow connects to paas using service account technical-architecture-paas@digital.education.gov.uk (a Google group).
The review apps are deployed to the technical-architecture-dev space and their name is suffixed by the PR number. There is no
cdn-route service, we simply use the default .london.cloudapps.digital domain.
The documentation is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.