Application: bouncer

Handles traffic for sites that have transitioned to GOV.UK

• GitHub: bouncer
• Ownership: #govuk-publishing-platform owns the repo. #govuk-publishing-platform-system-alerts receives automated alerts for this repo.
• Category: Transition apps
• Links:
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • App dashboard: request rates, errors, durations
  • Kibana App Logs (Production, last 3 hours)
  • Kibana Worker Logs (Production, last 3 hours)
  • Argo CD (bouncer)

Relevant manual pages

• Request Fastly TLS certificate
• Transition a site to GOV.UK
• Transition architecture

README

This is a Rack-based redirector. It serves 301s and 410s from mappings created by Transition.

Technical documentation

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Relationship with Transition

Bouncer and Transition currently share a database. As a result, we aim to keep a few of their dependencies in sync (on the same version), namely:

• rails (Transition) and activerecord (Bouncer)
• optic14n

Running the tests

bundle exec rake

Testing redirects

In order to test the redirect feature of this app, you can use a special bouncer-redirect.dev.gov.uk domain. We will create a mapping from this fake domain to GOV.UK.

1. Setup the Transition repo.

One of the seeded organisations will be “Cabinet Office”, which we will use in the next step.

2. In the Transition app, under the Cabinet Office organisation, add a new site.

Abbreviated name:	bouncer-redirect
TNA timestamp:	20141104112824
Homepage:	https://www.gov.uk
Hostname:	bouncer-redirect.dev.gov.uk
Global type:	Redirect
… with Global new URL:	https://www.gov.uk

This will create the site in the shared Transition / Bouncer DB.

3. Start the Bouncer app and go to bouncer-redirect.dev.gov.uk.

You should see that it redirects to GOV.UK, as specified in the site file.

Testing on staging environment

In contrast to other GOV.UK applications, Bouncer isn’t available at x.staging.publishing.service.gov.uk

This means that testing the application on our staging environment will require repointing the domains you wish to test by editing your computer’s host file to point them at Bouncer’s staging IP address. This should allow visiting the app in a web browser, for example. Alternatively, to make a request to our staging environment with curl:

curl -I -H"Host: www.attorneygeneral.gov.uk" http://0.0.0.0/aboutus/pages/civilcriminalpanels.aspx

Data storage

Lists of domain names, old URLs and URLs to redirect to are stored in a PostgreSQL database to which the application has read-only access.

Example application URLs

Here are some examples using a few of the many domain names which is served by Bouncer:

URL	Description
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov.uk/aboutus/pages/civilcriminalpanels.aspx	Serves a redirect to a page on GOV.UK
http://www.bonavacantia.gov.uk/output/accessibility.aspx	Serves a 410 archive page
http://rdpenetwork.defra.gov.uk/i-made-this-up	Serves a 404 not found page
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov.uk/sitemap.xml	Serves a sitemap of all redirects for the domain
http://www.attorneygeneral.gov.uk/robots.txt	Serves a minimal robots.txt

Licence

MIT License