Whitehall App

"Whitehall" is the code name for the Inside Government project, which aims to bring Government departments online in a consistent and user-friendly manner.

Getting set-up locally

Pre-requisites

• Ruby >= 1.9.2 (we have run it successfully against 1.9.2-p290 and 1.9.3-p0)
• Rubygems and Bundler
• Mysql
• Imagemagick and Ghostscript (for generating thumbnails of uploaded PDFs)
• PhantomJS (for running the Javascript tests)

Creating the mysql user

The database.yml for this project is checked into source control so you'll need a local user with credentials that match those in database.yml.

mysql> grant all on `whitehall\_%`.* to whitehall@localhost identified by 'whitehall';

Preparing the app

$ cd /path/to/whitehall
$ bundle install
$ bundle exec rake db:create:all
$ bundle exec rake db:schema:load

Running tests locally

Three environment variables must be set up, typically:

GOVUK_APP_DOMAIN=dev.gov.uk
GOVUK_ASSET_ROOT=http://static.dev.gov.uk

Then run

$ bundle exec rake

Alternatively run

$ govuk_setenv whitehall env RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake

Note that using bowler or foreman will automatically use the govuk_setenv method for you.

Getting a copy of live data

There's a capistrano task which will download a dump of the mysql database and load it on your local machine:

cap db:import

To use it, go to the whitehall directory in alphagov-deployment and then do:

$ SSH_USER=$USER DEPLOY_TO=production bundle exec cap db:import

this will load data from production into your local database.

Running the server locally

$ script/rails s

Creating new users in Production

New users will need a sign-on-o-tron account before they can access whitehall in production. You can create new sign-on-o-tron accounts with the capistrano task in alphagov-deployment/sign-on-o-tron. This will email the new user and prompt them to create their account.

Using local assets

• Set GOVUK_ASSET_ROOT to point to your local instance of the static app when running the whitehall app e.g. GOVUK_ASSET_ROOT=http://static.dev, this is set for you within the development VM.

Getting search running locally

The Whitehall app relies on Rummager for document indexing, and the Gov.UK frontend application to serve results.

To use a local copy of Rummager you'll need to:

• elasticsearch;
• Set the environment variable RUMMAGER_HOST to point to the local instance of Rummager (e.g. export RUMMAGER_HOST=http://rummager.dev in .powrc);
• You'll also need to set RUMMAGER_HOST when using the Rummager rake tasks e.g. RUMMAGER_HOST=http://rummager.dev rake rummager:index;
• Run the rummager and frontend applications to view results. You just need the rummager app to index results.

Specifying a different endpoint for the GDS Content API

Whitehall uses the GDS Content API to serve categorisation for Detailed Guidance.

You need to set the following environment variables :-

CONTENT_API_ENDPOINT_URL # e.g. https://contentapi.preview.alphagov.co.uk
CONTENT_API_USERNAME
CONTENT_API_PASSWORD