GOV.UK Developer Docs

👉 https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk

This is a static site generated with Middleman, using alphagov/tech-docs-template.

Some of the files (like the CSS, javascripts and layouts) are managed in the template and are not supposed to be modified here. Any project-specific Ruby code needs to go into /app.

Technical documentation

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.

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

Before running the app

The docs include pages pulled from other GitHub repositories. By default, all these "proxy" pages are pulled when you start the app, which can lead to rate limit error. Using a GitHub API token avoids this.

Create a GitHub auth token (the token doesn't need any permissions).

Store the token in a .env file like this:

GITHUB_TOKEN=somethingsomething

Alternatively, you can also disable proxy pages temporarily e.g.

env SKIP_PROXY_PAGES=true ./startup.sh

Disabling proxy pages means you'll get a "Not Found" error if you try to access them locally.

Testing the app

bundle exec rake

Updating the template

You can pull down the latest version of the Tech Docs template by running:

bin/update

Deployment

This project is hosted on GitHub Pages. It is redeployed hourly on weekdays (to pick up changes to external docs) and whenever a PR is merged.

As part of the deployment, we build a static set of pages to minimise the response time and potential issues with remote API calls.

NO_CONTRACTS=true bundle exec middleman build

This will create a bunch of static files in /build.

Licence

MIT License