Welcome the monorepo for the Planning Inspectorate Appeals Back-Office, a system to manage the processing of planning appeals submitted by the public (through the Appeals Front-Office).
The system is structured as a multi-tier application, designed to run on the Azure cloud and comprising of:
- A web front-end utilising server-side rendering through the Nunjucks templating language and the GOV.UK Design System
- A JSON back-end API processing data stored in a SQL database
- A shared Azure Service Bus Namespace, coordinating the exchange of business data between the Appeals Back-Office and other Planning Inspectorate applications
- A shared EntraID Instance, handling logins, role-based access and general OIDC protocol
- A shared Azure Storage Account, storing blob containers and blobs
- A number of Azure Functions, consuming messages from the Azure Service Bus and processing additional background tasks
Important
A detailed architectural overview is available as a set of C4 model diagrams
All apps in this monorepo are built with Express.js. In order to contribute to the development of the Appeals Back-Office, the following prerequisites need to be installed locally:
- Node.js LTS (installation through a Node version manager such as Nvm is recommended)
- Docker
Once the prerequisite software is installed, and the repository cloned, contributors can proceed to the setup and configuration of the system, as described in the basic setup guide.
With the system up and running locally, additional setup and configuration can enable secure features that are disabled by default
For additional information, please refer to the following documents:
MIT © Planning Inspectorate