How we build and operate products at the Department for Education. This repo is inspired by (and steals shamelessly from) the GDS Way and the Ministry of Justice Technical Guidance.

It's built using the GOV.UK tech-docs-template, and hosted on GOV.UK PaaS.

To preview the site locally, we need to use the terminal.

Install Ruby and Bundler, preferably with a Ruby version manager.

Once you have Ruby and Bundler set up, you can install this project's dependencies by running the following in this directory:

bundle install

To make changes edit the source files in the source folder.

Although a single page of HTML is generated the markdown is spread across multiple files to make it easier to manage. They can be found in source/documentation.

Make sure to make changes in a branch, and issue a pull request when you want them to be reviewed and published.

Whilst writing documentation we can run a middleman server to preview how the published version will look in the browser. After saving a change the preview in the browser will automatically refresh.

The preview is only available on our own computer. Others will not be able to access it if they are given the link.

Type the following to start the server:

make server

If all goes well something like the following output will be displayed:

== The Middleman is loading
== LiveReload accepting connections from ws://192.168.0.8:35729
== View your site at "http://Laptop.local:4567", "http://192.168.0.8:4567"
== Inspect your site configuration at "http://Laptop.local:4567/__middleman", "http://192.168.0.8:4567/__middleman"

You should now be able to view a live preview at http://localhost:4567.

If you want to publish the website without using a build script you may need to build the static HTML files. This will also allow you to preview the site exactly how it is published.

Type the following to build the HTML:

make build

This will create a build subfolder in the application folder which contains the HTML and asset files ready to be published.

Every change should be reviewed in a pull request, no matter how minor, and we've enabled branch protection to enforce this. Once the pull request is merged, the deploy Github action workflow runs the build and pushes the static site to GOV.UK PaaS.

The application is called dfe-technical-guidance and is supported by the Staticfile buildpack . It is deployed in the space technical-architecture, in the dfe organisation.

The custom domain, SSL certificate and CDN are provided by the technical-guidance cdn-route service.

The deploy workflow connects to paas using service account [email protected] (a Google group).

The documentation is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.