Application: whitehall

Publishes government content on GOV.UK

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

Relevant manual pages

• Add an organisation’s brand colour
• Rename a country
• Uptime Metrics

Example pages published by whitehall

• All ministers and senior officials on GOV.UK
• Ministers
• Find a British embassy, high commission or consulate
• The Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP
• Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
• The Rt Hon Rishi Sunak MP
• Prime Minister
• Secretary of State for the Home Department
• Secretary of State for Education
• The Rt Hon Steve Barclay MP

README

Whitehall is deployed in two modes:

• ‘admin’ for publishers to create and manage content (e.g. http://whitehall-admin.dev.gov.uk/government/admin/news/new)
• ‘frontend’ for rendering content to the public that has yet to be migrated to using Publishing API (see live examples that follow)

Live examples (public facing APIs)

• Governments: https://www.gov.uk/api/governments
• World Locations: https://www.gov.uk/api/world-locations

Live examples (public facing frontend)

CSV Previews

• CSV Preview pages: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/560889/LEMPRD_201610180000-CSV-GOVUK.csv/preview

Finders

• Non-English finders: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications.de

Fields of Operation

• Fields of Operation list: https://www.gov.uk/government/fields-of-operation
• Field of Operation pages: https://www.gov.uk/government/fields-of-operation/iraq

Government Information

• How government works page: https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works
• Current ministers list: https://www.gov.uk/government/ministers
• Past Chancellors of the Exchequer list: https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-chancellors
• Past Foreign Secretaries list: https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-foreign-secretaries
• Past Prime Ministers list: https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers
• Past Prime Minister pages: https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/clement-attlee

World Information

• Help and services around the world: https://www.gov.uk/world
• Non-English World Location News pages: https://www.gov.uk/world/brazil/news.pt
• UK International Delegation pages: https://www.gov.uk/world/uk-delegation-to-council-of-europe
• World Embassies list: https://www.gov.uk/world/embassies
• Worldwide Organisation pages: https://www.gov.uk/world/organisations/british-embassy-paris

Running the Application

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

Traditionally, the two sides of Whitehall are available on different domains in development, which reflect their counterparts in production:

While this usually results in different routing behaviour, in development all routes can be accessed from either domain, although the redirect behaviour may differ.

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

# run all the test suites
bundle exec rake

Javascript unit tests can also be run separately:

# run all the JavaScript tests
bundle exec rake jasmine

Further documentation

See the docs/ directory.

• CSS
• Edition workflow
• How to publish a finder in whitehall
• Internationalisation
• JavaScript
• Search setup guide
• Timestamps
• Troubleshooting
• Adding a data migration

Licence

MIT License