Application: whitehall

Publishes government content on GOV.UK

• GitHub: whitehall
• Ownership: #govuk-platform-health
• Hosting: AWS, on the whitehall_backend machine class
• Continuously deployed?: No
• Rake tasks: Run a Rake task on Integration, Staging or ⚠️ Production ⚠️
• Links:
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • Puppet configuration
  • Deploy scripts
  • Deployment dashboard
  • Publishing E2E scenarios (warning: not all apps have E2E tests)
  • whitehall-admin.publishing.service.gov.uk

Relevant manual pages

• Add an organisation’s brand colour
• Rename a country
• Uptime Metrics

Imported documents

• Edition Workflow
• Finders
• Internationalisation guide
• Link Checker API Integrations
• Search setup guide
• Testing Guide
• Timestamps
• Whitehall API
• Whitehall CSS Styleguide
• Whitehall JavaScript
• /migration_to_content_publisher
• Locked documents
• /misc
• guidelines-for-translators
• /sequence_diagrams
• Sequence Diagrams

Example pages published by whitehall

• Ministers
• Find a British embassy, high commission or consulate
• Professor Jonathan Van-Tam
• The Rt Hon Boris Johnson MP
• Professor Chris Whitty
• Prime Minister
• Secretary of State for the Home Department
• The Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP
• The Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP
• The Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP

README

whitehall is a Ruby on Rails content management application for content published by government departments and agencies.

Running the Application

Startup using govuk-docker.

There are two different views within this App, a Publishing view and a Site view. Once running, whitehall does not have an index, some suggested starting pages are below:

Publishing view:

• http://whitehall-admin.dev.gov.uk/government/admin/news/new

Site view:

• http://whitehall-frontend.dev.gov.uk/government/get-involved

Some pages will need data locally to display, whitehall uses mySQL. You’ll need to gain relevant permissions to access data from AWS

• Get setup with AWS access

• Once completed a guide to install local data on whitehall can be found here

Nomenclature

• Govspeak A variation of Markdown used throughout whitehall as the general publishing format

Technical documentation

whitehall is a Ruby on Rails app built on a MySQL database. It is deployed in two modes: ‘admin’ for publishers to create and manage content and ‘frontend’ for rendering some content under https://www.gov.uk/government and https://www.gov.uk/world. whitehall also sends most content to the publishing-api and rummager.

Dependencies

Local development dependencies

This application uses Ruby dependencies installed via Bundler and npm dependencies installed via Yarn.

These can be installed with:

bundle install
yarn install

Dependent GOV.UK apps

• alphagov/asset-manager: provides uploading for static files
• alphagov/publishing-api: documents are sent here, persisted and then requested
• alphagov/search-api: allows documents to be indexed for searching in both finders and site search
• alphagov/link-checker-api: checks all the links in an edition on request from the edition show page.

Other documentation

• Contributing guide
• CSS
• Edition workflow
• How to publish a finder in whitehall
• Internationalisation
• JavaScript
• Search setup guide
• Testing guide
• Timestamps

Generating technical documentation

We use YARD for the technical documentation. You can generate a local copy with:

yard server --reload

You can also read the docs on rdoc.info.

Licence

MIT License