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.

Build the app locally

bundle install

Run the tests locally

bundle exec rake

Run the app locally

SKIP_PROXY_PAGES=true ./startup.sh

Proxy pages

The live docs site includes pages from other alphagov GitHub repositories. To test this locally, omit SKIP_PROXY_PAGES=true from the command above.

The app downloads these "proxy pages" at startup and this can cause GitHub to rate limit your requests. You can pass a valid GitHub API token to the app to help avoid this:

1. Create a GitHub token. The token doesn't need any scopes.

2. Store the token in a .env file:

   GITHUB_TOKEN=somethingsomething

3. Start the application:

   ./startup.sh

Update to the latest Tech Docs template

bin/update

Deployment

We host GOV.UK Developer Docs as a static site on GitHub Pages. The ci.yml GitHub Actions workflow updates the site automatically:

• when a PR is merged to the default branch
• on an hourly schedule, to pick up changes to docs included from other repos

Build the static site locally

NO_CONTRACTS=true bundle exec middleman build

This will create a build directory containing a set of HTML files.

Licence

MIT License