Most documentation for the service can be found on the project's Confluence wiki. Some app-specific technical documentation can be found in the docs directory.
If you’re a developer on first-line support who is new to this project, see the
support runbook (docs/first-line-support-developer-runbook.md
)
for help with common support tasks.
The service architecture is currently defined on Confluence.
Architecture decision records can be found in the architecture-decisions directory.
docs/release-process.md
docs/school-check-data.md
openssl req -x509 -sha256 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -days 365 -keyout localhost.key -out localhost.crt
localhost.crt
File > Import Items
. Double click the imported certificate and change the
“When using this certificate:” dropdown to Always Trust
in the Trust
section.bundle install
and yarn install
to install the dependenciesDFE_SIGN_IN_API_SECRET
development secret from the
Azure key vault and store it in .env
at the root of the
repository.bundle exec rails db:setup
to set up the database developmentbundle exec foreman start
to launch the app on https://localhost:3000/The service uses DfE Sign In to handle admin users.
To use the /admin
site locally, you need the secret configuration variables
for DfE Sign In's pre-production environment. You can find these in the
development key vault on Azure.
Create a .env
file at the root of the repository, with the following
variables:
DFE_SIGN_IN_SECRET=<paste secret>
DFE_SIGN_IN_API_SECRET=<paste secret>
To access the admin routes, you will also need to request an account on DfE Sign In's pre-production environment.
The Ordnance Survey API is used for searching for addresses. The project makes use of two endpoints, which are used when teachers enter their address details in the user journey:
/search/places/v1/postcode
- for postcode/search/places/v1/find
- for postcode and building name and flat
number/street numberThis can be found in the SearchPlaces
class.
To enable address lookup set the following environment variables:
ORDNANCE_SURVEY_API_BASE_URL=<paste url here>
ORDNANCE_SURVEY_CLIENT_PARAMS={"key": <paste api key>}
During the claim user journey the user is prompted to enter their bank account details to receive their payment.
Bank accounts are validated using the HMRC Bank Account API.
To enable this to work, log in to the HMRC Developer Hub at https://developer.service.hmrc.gov.uk/, select the Sandbox application and then view the Client ID. Then create a client secret against the Sandbox application.
Then set the following environment variables:
HMRC_API_BASE_URL
HMRC_API_CLIENT_ID
HMRC_API_CLIENT_SECRET
Or disable the validation by setting HMRC_API_BANK_VALIDATION_ENABLED=false
.
We use Notify to send emails however it is turned off by default in development.
If you want to test Notify in development you will need an API key and add it to
your .env
file. Make sure you use a 'test' or 'team' API key only.
NOTIFY_API_KEY=<paste api key>
To enable Google Analytics set the following environment variable:
GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID=<UA PROPERTY>
To enable Google Tag Manager set the following environment variable:
GTM_ANALYTICS=<GTM PROPERTY>
CronJob
sTo schedule recurring jobs, run the following:
rake jobs:schedule
Look for jobs that inherit from CronJob
for a complete list of scheduled jobs.
bundle exec rake
To run the feature specs you will need Chrome installed.
Prefix the ENV variable VIEW when running a spec, e.g.:
VIEW=true be rspec spec/features/your_feature_spec.rb
To disable, just set VIEW=false
(or anything but true
) once.
be = bundle exec
Optionally you may run the specs in parallel with parallel_tests and turbo_tests
PARALLEL_TEST_FIRST_IS_1=true rails parallel:setup
bundle exec turbo_tests
Code linting is performed using:
Bullet runs around each spec. If it detects an N+1 query it will raise an exception and the tests will fail.
The application test suite makes use of a small number of
Rails fixtures
for some key models: School, LocalAuthority, and LocalAuthorityDistrict. This is
because these models map to real-world entities with unique identifiers, and
these identifiers are used as constants in the eligibility code. For example,
the local authority of Barnsley is eligible for student loans as it's local
authority code is listed in
StudentLoans::SchoolEligibility::ELIGIBLE_LOCAL_AUTHORITY_CODES
. By using
fixtures for a small number of these real-world entities we avoid potentially
flaky fixtures for things like eligible schools or districts where these unique
identifiers may clash. See the School factory for how the eligible school traits
make use of the local authority and district fixtures to create eligible
schools.
In development we do not automatically seed the database with the full list of
schools (as supplied by the Get Information About Schools service). To import
the full data set for schools run rails schools_data:import
. This can take a
few minutes to complete.
When running a live service sometimes you're required to change existing data in some way. We do this in a similar way to database migrations, using Data Migrations
The migrations are stored in the db/data
folder.
rails g data_migration add_this_to_that
rails runner db/data/$FILENAME_OF_THE_GENERATED_MIGRATION
When the new code deploys, you'll need to run your migration on the live service by running a live console.
Simplecov gem has been installed and the report is generated from a successful
run by running the following command bundle exec rspec
. For a more detailed
report click on the generated link
The base Azure infrastructure supporting the application is created from the infrastructure repository via terraform.
It creates resource groups, database server, app service plan, etc.
Test is automatically built and deployed when commits are pushed to master
.
You can check the progress of the build and release in Azure DevOps.
The test website is at https://test.additional-teaching-payment.education.gov.uk.
The release process for Production is documented in
docs/release-process.md
Adding the 'deploy' label to pull requests deploys a review app via Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with the URL:
https://claim-additional-payments-for-teaching-review-<PR NUMBER>-web.test.teacherservices.cloud
The review app is then destroyed when the PR is closed or merged.
Documentation on accessing review apps can be found in Connecting to Azure.
Accessing a live console is very risky and should only be done as a last resort. This should only be done in pairs, and mutating any live data is STRONGLY discouraged.
You can run a Rails console with bin/rails console
. Pass the --sandbox
flag if you don’t need to modify data.
Accessing a live console on production requires a PIM (Privileged Identity Management) request. Follow the steps outlined in Connect to an instance running in Azure.
kubectl -n <namespace> get deployments
kubectl -n <namespace> rollout restart deployment <deployment-name>
kubectl -n <namespace> get pods
. The column "AGE" should be updated.When accessing the Rails console on a live system, do so in sandbox mode to avoid making unintended changes to the database state:
bin/rails console --sandbox
.
In exceptional circumstances you may want to modify the data. If this is the case, you should probably write a data migration so that the code to do it can be reviewed and put into source control. If there is a need to make an immediate change live using the console, make sure it is done with approval from the Service Owner and is to done as a pair.
It is possible to close each service for applications in the admin interface under "Manage services" by changing the service status from "Open" to "Closed". When closed, the public-facing interface for making claims is disabled and a message explaining that the service is down is displayed. The admin interface remains open.
There are a few reasons each service might need to be closed:
A number of classes and components within this application have been written such that they are decoupled from the specifics of this service and could easily be reused in other projects.
There are a couple of utility classes in the lib
folder under the
DfeSignIn
namespace for interacting with DfE Sign-in single sign-on and the
DfE Sign-in API.
There is reusable code that enhances the application_insights
gem to include
the user IP address as part of the payload data sent to Application Insights in
lib/application_insights
. See
config/initializers/application_insights.rb
for how to mixin this code to your Rails application.