Application: service-manual-publisher

Publishes the Service Manual on GOV.UK

• GitHub: service-manual-publisher
• Ownership: #govuk-publishing-experience-tech
• Hosting: AWS, on the backend machine class
• Category: Publishing apps
• Rake tasks: Run a Rake task on Integration, Staging or ⚠️ Production ⚠️
• Links:
  • service-manual-publisher.publishing.service.gov.uk
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • Puppet configuration
  • Deploy scripts
  • Deployment dashboard

Example pages published by service-manual-publisher

• Service Standard
• Service Manual
• Agile delivery
• How the discovery phase works
• Service Toolkit
• Understanding WCAG 2.1
• How the alpha phase works
• Making your service accessible: an introduction
• User research
• How the beta phase works

README

Service Manual Publisher is used for publishing and maintaining https://www.gov.uk/service-manual. This application, together with Service Manual Frontend replaced the previous Jekyll-based service manual.

Nomenclature

• Guide: A guide is the main document format used for manuals.
• Guide Community: A profile page that represents the community who curate a collection of guides.
• Topic: A collection of guides.
• Point: A point from the service standard.

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails app, and should follow our Rails app conventions.

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rake

Further documentation

There is some disparity between the content as it appears in the database, and the content as it appears in the publishing api. This will need to be addressed if we switch to using the Publishing API as our main data store in the future.

The Service manual’s guide pages have a nested URL structure which is unusual for GOV.UK. The pros and cons to the nested URL structure are retrospectively documented.

Licence

MIT License