Application: publisher

Publishes mainstream content on GOV.UK

• GitHub: publisher
• Ownership: #govuk-publishing-experience-tech
• Hosting: AWS, on the backend machine class
• Category: Publishing apps
• Rake tasks: Run a Rake task on Integration, Staging or ⚠️ Production ⚠️
• Links:
  • publisher.publishing.service.gov.uk
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • Puppet configuration
  • Deploy scripts
  • Deployment dashboard

Example pages published by publisher

• Sign in to your Universal Credit account
• HMRC services: sign in or register
• Check the MOT history of a vehicle
• Get information about a company
• Tax your vehicle
• Check if a vehicle is taxed
• Sign in to your childcare account
• Universal Credit
• View or share your driving licence information
• Check the MOT status of a vehicle

README

Publisher is sometimes referred to as “mainstream publisher”.

Live examples

• Answer
• Completed transaction
• Guide
• Help page
• Licence
• Local transactions
• Place
• Service sign in
• Simple smart answer
• Transaction

Retired formats

• Campaign
• Programme
• Video

Removed formats

• Business Support - used to be retired, and the documents remained visible, now they’re fully removed as editions and no longer visible in the app (although the artefacts do still exist). They have been fully migrated to specialist-publisher.

Nomenclature

• Artefact: a document on GOV.UK.

Technical documentation

This is a Rails application and should follow our Rails app conventions.

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.

Testing

The default rake task runs all the tests:

bundle exec rake

State machine

Maps out the transitions between states for the Edition class. These transitions are defined in the workflow module. A diagram of the current state machine can be seen here: state machine diagram. The diagram can be (re)generated using the state_machines-graphviz gem, by doing:

bundle exec rake state_machines:draw CLASS=Edition TARGET=docs

This will generate a diagram in the docs/state_machines folder.

Further documentation

• Fact Checking

Working with Service Sign In pages

These pages do not have an admin interface and are instead managed through rake tasks.

See the README for more details.

Licence

MIT License