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

• Companies House
• HM Revenue & Customs
• Households encouraged to take small, simple steps to stay prepared in an emergency
• Verify your identity for Companies House
• Home Secretary unveils new rules for migrants settling in the UK
• Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
• Proving your identity with the GOV.UK One Login app
• Download the HMRC app
• Households to receive £150 Warm Home Discount confirmation letter
• Budget 2026: Breathing space for today, hope for the future

Rake tasks

See the 34 rake tasks for whitehall, with the commands to run them.

README

Whitehall (also known as ‘Whitehall Admin’ or ‘Whitehall Publisher’) is used by publishers to create and manage content.

Running the Application

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

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
• Internationalisation
• JavaScript
• Timestamps
• Troubleshooting
• Adding a data migration

Licence

MIT License