Repository: special-route-publisher
Publishes special routes on GOV.UK
- GitHub
- special-route-publisher
- Ownership
- #govuk-publishing-experience-tech
- Hosting
- N/A
- Category
- Utilities
Example pages published by special-route-publisher
README
Publishes special routes to the Publishing API on behalf of other apps.
Technical documentation
You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the tests and rake commands on your local machine. Follow the usage instructions to get started.
Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.
Running the test suite
bundle exec rake
Adding new routes
Add an entry to /data/special_routes.yaml, for example:
- :content_id: 'c1f08359-21f7-49c1-8811-54bf6690b6a3'
:base_path: '/account/home'
:title: 'Account home page'
:rendering_app: 'frontend'
You can generate a new value for content_id by running SecureRandom.uuid in a ruby console.
NOTE
If there is any other route published at that base_path by another app, that will get overridden by routes published here.
Publishing routes locally
You will need to start Publishing API and Content Store to run the following commands locally.
To publish all routes:
env PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=abc bundle exec rake publish_special_routes
To publish all routes for one application:
env PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=abc bundle exec rake publish_one_route[email-alert-frontend]
To publish one route:
env PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=abc bundle exec rake publish_one_route[/base-path]
To unpublish one route so it will return Gone:
env PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=abc bundle exec rake unpublish_one_route[/base-path]
To unpublish one route so it will return Redirect:
env PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=abc bundle exec rake unpublish_one_route[/base-path,/new-base-path]
Publishing routes on EKS
As special-route-publisher isn’t deployed anywhere we can’t use the usual instructions for running a rake task on EKS
First you need to set your aws user, and the enviroment you want to publish in. For example:
eval $(gds aws govuk-integration-poweruser -e --art 8h)
export AWS_REGION=eu-west-1
kubectl config use-context integration
Then you need to get the publishing-api bearer token from the kubernetes secret (you may need to brew install yq):
token=$(kubectl -napps get secret signon-token-special-route-publisher-publishing-api -oyaml | yq .data.bearer_token | base64 -d)
Then, run the rake task in a new kubernetes pod. As special-route-publisher isn’t deployed anywhere, you need to specify the image name. Also you must make sure that PLEK_USE_HTTP_FOR_SINGLE_LABEL_DOMAINS and PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN are set:
kubectl run -napps --image 172025368201.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-route-publisher ${USER/./-}-special-route-pub -- sh -c "GOVUK_APP_DOMAIN= PLEK_USE_HTTP_FOR_SINGLE_LABEL_DOMAINS=1 PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=$token rake publish_special_routes"
Use the [] notation to pass parameters to a task, for example:
kubectl run -napps --image 172025368201.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-route-publisher ${USER/./-}-special-route-pub -- sh -c "GOVUK_APP_DOMAIN= PLEK_USE_HTTP_FOR_SINGLE_LABEL_DOMAINS=1 PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=$token rake publish_one_special_route[/government/history/past-chancellors]"
Important: finally, delete your pod when it has finished running:
kubectl run -napps delete pod ${USER/./-}-special-route-pub
This is especially important if your pod is in a CrashLoopBackoff state (usually when something has gone run with publishing). Leaving it in existence in this state will lead to continuous re-running of the rake task you specified, which can lead to continuous republishing.
N.B. In these examples, $USER is just being used to set the name of the kubernetes pod. (Note that pod names cannot contain a period, so we substitute a dash for any periods in your username)
Deployment
This app doesn’t run anywhere. When it goes through the github deploy action, the image is published to the image registry. When this happens from the main branch, the image is tagged as ‘latest’ and will be the version picked when you spin the container up as detailed in the “Publishing routes on EKS” section above.
Testing a branch on integration
If you want to test publishing special routes from code that is not merged into the main branch, first deploy your branch using the normal github actions flow. Note as above that this does not actually deploy an application anywhere.
Grab the release tag for the pushed image from the github actions logs. This should be listed at the end of the “Push image” section, and will look something like: release-[some-sha]
Then follow the instructions in the “Publishing routes on EKS” section above, but when you spin up the new pod, append the release tag to the end of the image name, separated by a colon.
E.g. to publish all the routes:
kubectl run -napps --image 172025368201.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/special-route-publisher:release-[some-sha] ${USER/./-}-special-route-pub -- sh -c "GOVUK_APP_DOMAIN= PLEK_USE_HTTP_FOR_SINGLE_LABEL_DOMAINS=1 PUBLISHING_API_BEARER_TOKEN=$token rake publish_special_routes"