GOV.UK Forms Admin

GOV.UK Forms is a service for creating forms. GOV.UK Forms Admin is a an application to handle the administration, design and publishing of those forms. It's a Ruby on Rails application built on a PostgreSQL database.

Before you start

To run the project you will need to install:

• Ruby - we use version 3 of Ruby. Before running the project, double check the .ruby-version file to see the exact version.
• Node.js - the frontend build requires Node.js. We use Node 20 LTS versions.
• a running PostgreSQL database

We recommend using a version manager to install and manage these, such as:

• RVM or rbenv for Ruby
• nvm for Node.js
• asdf for both

Getting started

Installing for the first time

# 1. Clone the git repository and change directory to the new folder
git clone git@github.com:alphagov/forms-admin.git
cd forms-admin

# 2. Run the setup script
./bin/setup

Running the app

You can either run the development task:

# Run the foreman dev server. This will also start the frontend dev task
./bin/dev

or run the rails server:

# Run a local Rails server
./bin/rails server

# When running the server, you can use any of the frontend tasks, e.g.:
npm run dev

You will also need to run the forms-api service, as this app needs the API to create and access forms.

Development tools

Running the tests

The app tests are written with rspec-rails and you can run them with:

bundle exec rspec

There are also unit tests for JavaScript code (look for files named *.test.js), written with Vitest. You can run those with:

npm run test

Linting

We use RuboCop GOV.UK for linting code. To autocorrect issues run:

bundle exec rubocop -A

We also use the i18n-tasks tool to keep our locales files in a consistent order. When the tests run, they will check if the locale files are normalised and fail if they are not. To fix the locale files automatically, you can run:

bundle exec i18n-tasks normalize

On GitHub pull requests, we also check our dependencies for security issues using [bundler-audit]. You can run this locally with:

bundle audit

Running tasks with Rake

We have a Rakefile that is set up to follow the GOV.UK conventions for Rails applications.

To lint your changes and run tests with one command, you can run:

bundle exec rake

Setting up the database

To run this project, your database will need to have a user in it. The bin/setup script will normally take care of this for you. However, if you need to quickly add some users, you can do so by loading the database seed:

./bin/rails db:seed

Changing configuration

Changing settings

Refer to the the config gem to understand the file based settings loading order.

To override file based via Machine based env variables settings

cat config/settings.yml
file
  based
    settings
      env1: 'foo'

export SETTINGS__FILE__BASED__SETTINGS__ENV1="bar"

puts Settings.file.based.setting.env1
bar

Refer to the settings file for all the settings required to run this app

Environment variables

Name	Purpose
DATABASE_URL	The URL to the postgres instance (without the database at the end)

Feature flags

This repo supports the ability to set up feature flags. To do this, add your feature flag in the settings file under the features property. eg:

features:
  some_feature: true

You can then use the feature service to check whether the feature is enabled or not. Eg. FeatureService.enabled?(:some_feature).

You can also nest features:

features:
  some:
    nested_feature: true

And check with FeatureService.enabled?("some.nested_feature").

You can also set a feature for users from a specific organisation:

features:
  some_feature:
    enabled: false
    organisations:
      some_organisation: true

The features.some_features.enabled key sets the default for the flag, and then you can override for an organisation by adding a key for the organisation slug (with underscores instead of dashes). And then check the flag for a user with FeatureService.new(user).enabled?(:some_feature).

Testing with features

You can also tag RSpec tests with feature_{name}: true. This will turn that feature on just for the duration of that test.

Configuring GOV.UK Notify

We use GOV.UK Notify to send emails from our apps.

If you want to test the Notify functionality locally, you will need to get a test API key from the Notify service. Add it as an environment variable under SETTINGS__GOVUK_NOTIFY__API_KEY or add it to a local config file:

# config/settings.local.yml

# Settings for GOV.UK Notify api & email templates
govuk_notify:
  api_key: <API key from Notify>

You can view example emails locally by visiting http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers

Configuring Sentry

We use Sentry to catch and alert us about exceptions in production apps.

We currently have a very basic setup for Sentry in this repo for testing, which we will continue to build upon.

In order to use Sentry locally, you will need to:

1. Sign in to Sentry using your work Google account.
2. Create a new project.
3. Add the Sentry DSN to your environment as SETTINGS__SENTRY__DSN, or add it to a local config file:

# config/settings.local.yml

sentry:
  DSN: <DSN from Sentry>

If you want to deliberately raise an exception to test, uncomment out the triggers in the Sentry initializer script. Whenever you run the app errors will be raised and should also come through on Sentry.

Deploying apps

The forms-admin app is containerised (see Dockerfile) and can be deployed however you would normally deploy a containerised app.

We host our apps using Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can read about how deployments happen on our team wiki, if you have access.

Logging

• HTTP access logs are managed using Lograge and configured within the application config.
• The output format is JSON using the JsonLogFormatter to enable simpler searching and visbility, especially in Splunk.
• Do not use log_tags since it breaks the JSON formatting produced by Lograge.

Updating Docker files

To update the version of Alpine Linux and Ruby used in the Dockerfile, use the update_app_versions.sh script in forms-deploy

Support

Raise a GitHub issue if you need support.

How to contribute

We welcome contributions - please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the alphagov Code of Conduct before contributing.

License

We use the MIT License.