Warning This document has not been updated for a while now. It may be out of date.

Last updated: 18 May 2020

Learn how GOV.UK works

Welcome to GOV.UK! Let’s start off by saying that GOV.UK publishing system is quite complex. It can be daunting task to get to know the platform. This page is meant as a starter guide to learning about GOV.UK.

2nd line

• 2nd line
• 2nd line drills
• Access to Licensify for Third Parties
• Licensify - supporting licensing
• Out of hours support (on-call)
• PagerDuty
• Rules for getting production access
• Scale unicorn workers
• Subject Access Request (SAR)
• Zendesk

A/B testing

• How A/B testing works

Applications

• Architectural deep-dive of GOV.UK
• Architectural summary of GOV.UK
• Architecture overview of GOV.UK applications
• Configure linting
• Conventions for Rails applications
• Node classes without redundancy

Assets

• Assets: how they work

AWS

• AWS IAM Key Rotation
• Common AWS tasks for Technical 2nd Line
• How to raise a support ticket with AWS
• Migration to AWS

Backups

• PostgreSQL backups

CDN & Caching

• Our content delivery network (CDN)

Cookies

• Cookie consent on GOV.UK
• Cookies and sessions in GOV.UK frontend apps

data.gov.uk

• Architecture of data.gov.uk
• Data.gov.uk Contracts Archive

Dependencies

• Policy on keeping software current

Deployment

• The development and deployment pipeline

Docker

• Intro to GOV.UK Docker
• Intro to GOV.UK Docker (Advanced)

Documentation

• Documentation style guide
• READMEs for GOV.UK applications

Emails

• Email notifications: how they work
• How we use GOV.UK Notify

Frontend

• Analytics on GOV.UK
• Find a rails template based on a GOV.UK URL or vice verca
• Frontend architecture
• Google Tag Manager change process
• Guidance and tools for digital accessibility
• Local frontend development
• Test a branch of the components gem
• The component system
• Which browsers we support

GitHub

• How we use GitHub

GOV.UK Account

• How does the GOV.UK Account work?

Incidents

• Incident management guidance

Infrastructure

• Domain Name System (DNS) records
• GOV.UK and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
• GOV.UK’s environments (integration, staging, production)
• Load Testing
• New instances fail to provision
• Rate Limiting
• Rollback Puppet if Jenkins is broken
• Upgrade Terraform

Learning GOV.UK

• Dictionary of concepts on GOV.UK
• How to be a good buddy
• Responsibilities of a Tech Lead
• Where to find what documentation

Logging

• How logging works on GOV.UK
• Request tracing

Monitoring

• Environment data sync
• Grafana
• Graphite and deployment dashboards
• Icinga
• Metrics
• Pingdom Bouncer canary check
• Screens that we have in the office
• Sentry
• Sidekiq
• Tools: Icinga, Grafana and Graphite, Kibana and friends
• Uptime Metrics

Notify Emergency Alerts

• What is GOV.UK Notify Emergency Alerts?

Publishing

• How the draft stack works
• How the topic taxonomy works
• How the world taxonomy works
• Related links
• What data we expose as schema.org structured data

Team tools

• GitHub Trello Poster

Testing

• Brakeman
• How we test GOV.UK
• Jenkins CI infrastructure
• Pact Testing

Transition

• Transition architecture

More in the Learning GOV.UK section

Learn

• Dictionary of concepts on GOV.UK
• How to be a good buddy
• Responsibilities of a Tech Lead
• Where to find what documentation

How to...

• Ask for help
• Get started on GOV.UK