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
Schemas
Not all schemas that this app can handle are rendered by it in production.
| Schema | Live example | Production status |
|---|---|---|
| Answer | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Case study | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Coming soon | Rendered by Whitehall | |
| Consultation | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Contacts | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Corporate information page | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Detailed guide | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Document collection | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Fatality notice | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Help page | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| HTML Publication | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| News Article | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Publication | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Specialist document | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Statistics announcement | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Statistical data set | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Speech | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Take part | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Topical event about page | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Travel advice | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Unpublishing | Rendered by Whitehall, might not be migrated | |
| World Location News Article | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
| Working group | View on GOV.UK | Migrated |
Components
Pages are rendered using components. Components can be specific to government-frontend or shared between applications.
Shared components are provided by static and are documented in the static component guide.
Components specific to government-frontend are within the application and follow rules set out by the govuk_publishing_components gem. They are documented in the government-frontend component guide.
When running government-frontend locally the component guide is available at: http://government-frontend.dev.gov.uk/component-guide
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.
- phantomjs Used by poltergeist for integration testing
- ImageMagick Used by Wraith for visual regression testing
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.
./startup.sh --dummy
This will run the app and point it at the dummy content store, which serves the content schema examples and random content.
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
Debugging Integration tests
If you want to see the page that is being tested in our integration tests, you can use
save_and_open_page to see what's rendered. This is helpful when a page is mostly comprised of
GOV.UK Publishing Components
Visual regression tests
Use Wraith ("A responsive screenshot comparison tool") to generate a visual diff to compare rendering changes in this application.
Compare with production
Compare development with production:
bundle exec wraith capture test/wraith/config.yaml
Compare staging with production:
bundle exec wraith capture test/wraith/config-staging-vs-production.yaml
This will generate image diffs comparing the two runs, including a browsable
gallery of the output, located at shots/gallery.html.
Compare examples on master with examples on branch
Examples are referencing https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-content-schemas
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 test/wraith/config-examples.yaml
Then switch to your branch and create a set of screenshots to compare against using:
bundle exec wraith latest test/wraith/config-examples.yaml
Compare a document_type
A rake task has been made to make this easy, given a document_type of about
bundle exec rake wraith:document_type[about]
this will run against the 10 most popular pages as defined by the search api
Compare all document_types
bundle exec rake wraith:all_document_types[:sample_size]
This will run against the 10 (can be overidden with :sample_size) most popular pages as defined by the search api,
for each known document_type in the app (see: Generate a config for known document_types and example pages).
Note: If you wish to have your own local wip configs, wip* is in the .gitignore, so as an example
wip-kittens.yaml will be ignored
Generate a config for known document_types and example pages
Running the rake task below will retrieve the document_types where rendering_app = government-frontend from the search api. It will then generate test/wraith/wip-config-all-document-types.yaml, this is a wraith config file containing the top 10 (can be overidden with :sample_size) example pages for each type.
The yaml file contains a custom key of :document_types not used by wraith but can be used to quickly scan and see which types the search api believes government-frontend is responsible for.
bundle exec rake wraith:update_document_types[:sample_size]
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]