Republish content

Last updated: 4 Aug 2022

Sometimes it may be necessary to republish content to the Publishing API. This will refresh the content on the website.

For example if we make an update to govspeak and a publishing application pre-renders that content prior to its submission to Publishing API, that would require us to re-render and save new HTML for content.

This process varies per app and requires

Connection to the [VPN][vpn] and
Production access

You may wish to test first on integration, prior to carrying out the republish in production.

Whitehall

If the documents are in Whitehall, there are Rake tasks you can run as outlined below. Try to pick the one most focused to the scope of what you need to republish to avoid unnecessary load. You can monitor the effect on the publishing queue via these Grafana dashboards:

To republish a single document by slug

Replace slug with the document’s slug, but not the full base path. For example the slug for https://www.gov.uk/government/important-news would be important-news.

To republish all documents of a specific type

To republish all instances of the following document types, run the following rake task.

CaseStudy
Consultation
Contact
CorporateInformationPage
DetailedGuide
DocumentCollection
FatalityNotice
Government
NewsArticle
OperationalField
Organisation
Person
PolicyGroup
Publication
Role
RoleAppointment
Speech
StatisticalDataSet
StatisticsAnnouncement
TakePartPage
TopicalEvent
TopicalEventAboutPage
WorldLocation
WorldwideOrganisation

Replace DocumentClass with the camelized (i.e. as it is written above) class name.

To republish multiple documents

For a small number of documents, use the following rake task:

Replace content_id_1 and content_id_2 with the content ID (i.e. UUID) for the documents to republish. You can add more than 2 content IDs.

For a significant number of documents, a CSV file should be added to the repository:

Create a CSV file that contains a single column headed content_id. Put the content ID for each document on a separate line below this. The file should be saved in lib/tasks/{FILENAME}.csv and a PR raised.
Merge and deploy the PR to the relevant environment.
Run the documents_by_content_ids_from_csv rake task:

Replace csv_file_name with the filename of the CSV, including the .csv extension. 1. After the job has completed, remove the CSV from the repository.

To republish all documents

Caution: this is a lot of content and will take hours to complete. If it is possible to scope the republish do so and use a different task, but if you have made a change such as something in govspeak that will affect the majority of content, this is available. Before running this job confirm with Technical 2nd Line that they are happy for you to proceed as it could cause backed up publishing queues and alerts.

Content Publisher

If the document is in content publisher, there is a resync Rake task you can run.

You can resync a single document by passing it a content ID and locale:

or you can resync all documents: