Change a government following a general election
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 government
link. - 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
in Integration - Run
search:political
in Staging - ⚠️ Run
search:political
in Production ⚠️