Application: whitehall

Publishes government content on GOV.UK

• GitHub: whitehall
• Ownership: #govuk-whitehall-experience-tech
• Category: Publishing apps
• Links:
  • whitehall-admin.publishing.service.gov.uk
  • 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 (whitehall-admin)

Relevant manual pages

• Add an organisation’s brand colour or logo
• Rename a country

Example pages published by whitehall

• Apply for an electronic travel authorisation (ETA)
• Check if you can get an electronic travel authorisation (ETA)
• Online immigration status (eVisa)
• Changes to passport application fees
• About our services
• Download the HMRC app
• Rates and thresholds for employers 2025 to 2026
• Biggest shake up to welfare system in a generation to get Britain working
• Using the ‘UK ETA’ app
• Linking the GOV.UK ID Check app to GOV.UK

README

Whitehall (also known as ‘Whitehall Admin’ or ‘Whitehall Publisher’) is used by publishers to create and manage content (e.g. http://whitehall-admin.dev.gov.uk/government/admin/news/new).

Running the Application

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

Nomenclature

• Govspeak A variation of Markdown used throughout whitehall as the general publishing format

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails app, 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.

Running the test suite

These commands assume you have the GOV.UK Docker environment running and its binaries in your PATH.

# run all the test suites
govuk-docker-run bundle exec rake

Javascript unit tests can also be run separately:

# run all the JavaScript tests
govuk-docker-run bundle exec rake jasmine

Further documentation

See the docs/ directory.

• Content Audit Trail
• CSS
• Edition model
• Edition workflow
• How to publish a finder in whitehall
• Internationalisation
• JavaScript
• Search Indexing
• Timestamps
• Troubleshooting
• Adding a data migration

Licence

MIT License