Government Frontend is a public-facing app to display the majority of documents
on the /government part of GOV.UK. It is a replacement for the public-facing
parts of the Whitehall application.
Screenshots

Schemas
Not all schemas that this app can handle are rendered by it in production.
Components
Pages are rendered using components. Components can be specific to government-frontend or shared between applications.
Shared components are provided by govuk_publishing_components and are documented in the component guide.
Components specific to government-frontend are within the application and follow rules set out by the govuk_publishing_components gem. They are documented in the government-frontend component guide.
When running government-frontend locally the component guide is available at: http://government-frontend.dev.gov.uk/component-guide
Configuration for the navigation links shown on the B variant of the ContentPagesNav A/B test is covered separately
Technical documentation
This is a Ruby on Rails application that fetches documents from
content-store and displays them.
Dependencies
-
content-store - provides documents
-
static - provides shared GOV.UK assets and templates.
-
phantomjs Used by poltergeist for integration testing
-
ImageMagick Used by Wraith for visual regression testing
Running the application
./startup.sh
The app should start on http://localhost:3090 or
http://government-frontend.dev.gov.uk on GOV.UK development machines.
./startup.sh --live
This will run the app and point it at the production GOV.UK content-store
and static
instances.
./startup.sh --dummy
This will run the app and point it at the dummy content store, which serves the content schema examples and random content.
Running the test suite
The test suite relies on the presence of the
govuk-content-schemas
repository. If it is present at the same directory level as
the government-frontend repository then run the tests with:
bundle exec rake
Or to specify the location explicitly:
GOVUK_CONTENT_SCHEMAS_PATH=/some/dir/govuk-content-schemas bundle exec rake
Debugging Integration tests
If you want to see the page that is being tested in our integration tests, you can use
save_and_open_page
to see what's rendered. This is helpful when a page is mostly comprised of
GOV.UK Publishing Components
Visual regression tests
Use Wraith ("A responsive screenshot
comparison tool") to generate a visual diff to compare rendering changes in this
application.
Compare with production
Compare development with production:
bundle exec wraith capture test/wraith/config.yaml
Compare staging with production:
bundle exec wraith capture test/wraith/config-staging-vs-production.yaml
This will generate image diffs comparing the two runs, including a browsable
gallery of the output, located at shots/gallery.html
.
Compare examples on master with examples on branch
Examples are referencing https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-content-schemas
With government-frontend running master on the development VM and while pointing at the dummy content store, create a set of historical screenshots using:
cd test/wraith
bundle exec wraith history test/wraith/config-examples.yaml
Then switch to your branch and create a set of screenshots to compare against using:
bundle exec wraith latest test/wraith/config-examples.yaml
Compare a document_type
A rake task has been made to make this easy, given a document_type
of about
bundle exec rake wraith:document_type[about]
this will run against the 10 most popular pages as defined by the search api
Compare all document_types
bundle exec rake wraith:all_document_types[:sample_size]
This will run against the 10 (can be overidden with :sample_size
) most popular pages as defined by the search api,
for each known document_type
in the app (see: Generate a config for known document_types and example pages).
Note: If you wish to have your own local wip configs, wip* is in the .gitignore, so as an example
wip-kittens.yaml
will be ignored
Generate a config for known document_types and example pages
Running the rake task below will retrieve the document_types
where rendering_app = government-frontend
from the search api. It will then generate test/wraith/wip-config-all-document-types.yaml
, this is a wraith config file containing the top 10 (can be overidden with :sample_size
) example pages for each type.
The yaml file contains a custom key of :document_types
not used by wraith but can be used to quickly scan and see which types the search api believes government-frontend
is responsible for.
bundle exec rake wraith:update_document_types[:sample_size]
Webchat
How to add a new webchat provider
- Open to
lib/webchat.yaml
- Append new entry:
- base_path: /government/contact/my-amazing-service
open_url: https://www.my-amazing-webchat.com/007/open-chat
availability_url: https://www.my-amazing-webchat.com/007/check-availability
- Deploy changes
- Go to https://www.gov.uk/government/contact/my-amazing-service
- Finished
CORS considerations
To avoid CORS and CSP issues a new provider would need to be added to the Content Security Policy
Required configuration
Base path
This is the base path of a contact page, for example, /government/organisations/hm-revenue-customs/contact/child-benefit
.
This path should always be a contact page, any other content page type will result in the webchat component not being loaded.
Availability URL
This URL is used to check the availability of agents at regular intervals.
Function |
Required |
Request Method |
GET |
Response Format |
JSON/JSONP (Default to JSONP) |
Request Example |
{"status":"success","response":"BUSY"} |
Valid statuses |
["BUSY", "UNAVAILABLE", "AVAILABLE","ONLINE", "OFFLINE", "ERROR"] |
Open URL
This url is used to start a webchat session.
This url should not include session ids or require anything specific parameters to be generated.
Optional Configuration options
Browser window behaviour
By default the chat session would open in an a separate browser window. An additional value can be added to the yaml entry that will allow the web chat to remain in the current browser window.
open_url_redirect: true
The default response from the api as used by HMRC webchat provider is JSONP. To add a provider that responds using JSON the following entry needs to be added.
availability_payload_format: json
Licence
MIT License