"Whitehall" is the code name for the Inside Government project, which aims to bring Government departments online in a consistent and user-friendly manner. Documentation can be found on rdoc.
- Govspeak A variation of Markdown used throughout 'Whitehall' as the general publishing format
Whitehall is a Rails 4 app built on a MySQL database. It is deployed in two modes, 'admin' for publishers to create and manage content and 'frontend' for rendering content under https://www.gov.uk/government. In addition to storing and managing its own content database Whitehall also updates various other APIs including search and is currently being migrated towards a new publishing model utilising Publishing API and Content Store.
- Xcode (for the Command Line Tools
xcode-select --install) - Ruby 2.2.3
- Rubygems and Bundler
- Mysql
- Imagemagick and Ghostscript (for generating thumbnails of uploaded PDFs)
- xpdf (first download XQuartz)
- PhantomJS (for running the Javascript tests)
The application can be started with
bundle exec rails s
Note that the application itself will respond to requests on the root URL / with a
routing error. To check that it works, try visiting /government/admin and /government/organisations.
Further setup instructions are available in the detailed setup guide
See the testing guide
GOV.UK shares assets (eg stylesheets and JavaScript) across apps using the
slimmer gem and the static
app.
See the local asset setup guide
The Whitehall app relies on Rummager for document indexing, and the GOV.UK frontend application to serve results.
See the search setup guide
We use YARD for the documentation. You can generate a local copy with:
yard server --reload
You can also read the docs on rdoc.info.