Support government changes
Change a government in Whitehall
Following a General Election or other reason for governmental change the current Government in Whitehall will need to be closed, and a new one created.
The Content Support team will normally be the ones who close the government and re-assign ministers once a new government has been opened. However, a developer will often be required to monitor the queues, as detailed below.
Closing a government
Governments are listed at the government path of Whitehall Admin.
- Select the current government, and click the
Prepare to close this governmentlink. - Close the government.
This will close the current government and remove all ministerial appointments.
This will cause a high number of documents to be represented by the Publishing API which might mean some delays on content being up to date on the website. Previous tests have shown that it takes around 3.5 hours for the queues to clear in integration.
Grafana monitoring for:
- Publishing API in Integration
- Publishing API in Staging
- ⚠️ Publishing API in Production ⚠️
- Sidekiq in Integration
- Sidekiq in Staging
- ⚠️ Sidekiq in Production ⚠️
Open a new government
This will instantly create a new government. Changes can be seen in the Rails
console by running Government.current.
The new government should also instantly appear in the response from /api/governments.
Applying a banner to political content published by the previous government
Content in Whitehall can be marked as political. Political content which was
published under a previous government is historic?. This is
highlighted on the page, and in search results. This feature is also known as
history mode.
See these pages for example:
A content page A search results page
Marking content as political can happen automatically through the
PoliticalContentIdentifier. The political flag on an Edition can also
be set manually.
Reindexing political content in search
There is a Rake task to reindex all political content in search. This must be done after a government is closed.
- Run search:political on Integration
- Run search:political on Staging
- ⚠️ Run search:political on Production ⚠️
Backdating
If we need to backdate a government or split a single government into two distinct dates, we need to run a rake task to republish all political content from Whitehall to properly associate content with the government at it’s first published date:
- Run election:republish_political_content on Integration
- Run election:republish_political_content on Staging
- ⚠️ Run election:republish_political_content on Production ⚠️
Ending ministerial roles without closing a government
If we need to end all ministerial roles without explicitly closing a government, we can run a rake task:
- Run election:end_ministerial_appointments on Integration
- Run election:end_ministerial_appointments on Staging
- ⚠️ Run election:end_ministerial_appointments on Production ⚠️
This will end all ministerial roles except the Prime Minister. You might have to do that one manually.
Machinery of Government Changes
Following machinery of government changes, developers can help content designers make bulk changes to documents and users.
Bulk changing users
There is a Rake task in Signon to change the organisation that a user belongs
to in bulk:
data_hygiene:bulk_update_organisation[csv_file].
It accepts a CSV file which should have at least the following columns (in any order):
| Column Header | Description |
|---|---|
Old email |
The old email address of the user. |
New email |
The new email address of the user. |
New organisation |
The slug of the new organisations for the user. |
Note: It may be necessary to leave the old users around so they can still edit content for the old organisation. In that case you can bulk invite new users using the interface in Signon.
Bulk retagging documents
There is a Rake task in Whitehall to change the lead and supporting
organisations that a document is tagged to in bulk:
data_hygiene:bulk_update_organisation[csv_file].
It accepts a CSV file which should have at least the following columns (in any order):
| Column Header | Description |
|---|---|
Slug |
The slug of the document. |
Document type |
The type of the document, for example DetailedGuide. This is used when more than one document is matched by the Slug. |
New lead organisations |
The slugs of the new leading organisations (separated by a comma). These will replace any existing organisations. |
New supporting organisations |
The slugs of the new supporting organisations (separated by a comma). These will replace any existing organisations. |
To run on anything other than a local environment, the CSV needs to be added manually to the /tmp directory using scp-push.
$ gds govuk connect scp-push --environment [integration|staging|integration] name-of-machine[:1|:2|:3] path/to/file.csv /tmp/
The rake task can then be run from the command line following these instructions.
There is a similar Rake task to change the organisations for Manuals. A data migration is required to change the organisations for (Mainstream) Publisher documents. This is an example PR: Migrate Publisher docs
Reorder ministers/peoples role titles
During a reshuffle, a minister can gain two positions of state, known as RoleAppointments
in Whitehall. One of these is perceived to be a more senior role than the other.
To reorder a minister or persons titles, visit the following URL, replacing <person-name> with the hyphenated name of the person:
https://whitehall-admin.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/admin/people/<person-name>/reorder_role_appointments
For example, for Rishi Sunak it would be:
https://whitehall-admin.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/admin/people/rishi-sunak/reorder_role_appointments