Retire an application
1. Remove app from puppet
Configure Puppet to remove the app from all servers. Change the app resource,
and any database resources to ensure => absent, remove any host and
load-balancer entries, but leave the hieradata entries.
See this pull request for an example:
After this has been deployed, remove it entirely. For example:
2. Remove smoke tests
Remove any smokey tests specific to the application.
3. Remove deploy scripts
Remove necessary scripts from the alphagov-deployment (private repo) and govuk-app-deployment repos.
4. Update Release app
Mark the application as archived in the Release app.
Edit the application in the release app (you’ll need the deploy permission to
do this), and check the archived checkbox. This will hide it from the UI.
5. Remove from deploy Jenkins
Remove entry from the deploy Jenkinses. This is managed
through govuk-puppet in the common.yml.
6. Update Signon
Mark the application as “retired” in signon, if it used it.
Click on the Applications tab. Find the application that is being retired and click the “edit” button. Tick the box that says “This application is being retired”, then save your changes.
7. Remove from GOV.UK Docker
Remove from the projects directory and any references in docker compose or throughout the repo.
8. Check replication script
Check the data replication scripts for anything specific to this application.
Some applications have special case details in https://github.com/alphagov/env-sync-and-backup/. Any relating to the application should be removed.
9. Update DNS
Request any public DNS entries be removed. If the app had an admin UI, it will
have had public DNS entries in the publishing.service.gov.uk domain.
Follow the instructions for DNS changes in order to remove these, and ask the Reliability Engineering team to approve any necessary Pull Requests.
10. Update docs
Mark the application as retired in govuk-developer-docs.
11. Remove credentials
Remove any hieradata credential entries for the app in govuk-secrets (private repo).
12. Drop database
If Puppet hasn’t done it (eg for MongoDB databases), drop the database.
13. Remove jobs in CI
If tests were set up, go to CI and choose “Delete Repository” for your project.
14. Remove other references
Do a code search on GitHub to find any references to the application and update or remove them.
15. Unpublish routes
Some applications are responsible for publishing certain routes. If you’re retiring a publishing application, make sure you check if any of its content items need to be unpublished and do it via the Publishing API.
16. Remove from Sentry
Since the application has been retired, it shouldn’t be tracked in Sentry.
17. Archive the repo
Go into the repository settings in GitHub, and archive the repo.