dsingleton / government-frontend

Public-facing app to display documents on www.gov.uk/government

Government Frontend

Government Frontend is a public-facing app to display the majority of documents on the /government part of GOV.UK. It is a replacement for the public-facing parts of the Whitehall application.

Screenshots

Formats

Not all formats that this app can handle are rendered by it in production.

Format	Live example	Production status
Case study	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Coming soon		Rendered by Whitehall
Consultation	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Detailed guide	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Document collection	View on GOV.UK	Migrated on live. Draft rendered by Whitehall.
Fatality notice	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
HTML Publication	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Publication		Rendered by Whitehall
Statistics announcement	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Statistical data set	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Speech		Rendered by Whitehall
Take part	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Topical event about page	View on GOV.UK	Migrated
Unpublishing		Rendered by Whitehall, might not be migrated
Working group	View on GOV.UK	Migrated

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails application that fetches documents from content-store and displays them.

Dependencies

• content-store - provides documents
• static - provides shared GOV.UK assets and templates.

Running the application

./startup.sh

The app should start on http://localhost:3090 or http://government-frontend.dev.gov.uk on GOV.UK development machines.

./startup.sh --live

This will run the app and point it at the production GOV.UK content-store and static instances.

Running the test suite

The test suite relies on the presence of the govuk-content-schemas repository. If it is present at the same directory level as the government-frontend repository then run the tests with:

bundle exec rake

Or to specify the location explicitly:

GOVUK_CONTENT_SCHEMAS_PATH=/some/dir/govuk-content-schemas bundle exec rake

Visual regression tests

Use Wraith ("A responsive screenshot comparison tool") to generate a visual diff to compare rendering changes in this application.

With government-frontend running on the development VM, navigate to the project directory and run

cd test/wraith
bundle install # only need to run this once to grab the dependencies

Compare with production

Compare development with production:

bundle exec wraith capture config.yaml

Compare staging with production:

bundle exec wraith capture config-staging-vs-production.yaml

This will generate image diffs comparing the two runs, including a browsable gallery of the output, located at test/wraith/shots/gallery.html.

Compare examples on master with examples on branch

With government-frontend running master on the development VM and while pointing at the dummy content store, create a set of historical screenshots using:

cd test/wraith
bundle exec wraith history config-examples.yaml

Then switch to your branch and create a set of screenshots to compare against using:

bundle exec wraith latest config-examples.yaml

Adding a new format

There’s a rails generator you can use to stub the basic files needed for a new format. It stubs the following:

• Stylesheet
• Template
• Presenter
• Presenter test
• Integration test

bundle exec rails generate format [format_name]

Licence

MIT License