GOV.UK Forms Product Pages

GOV.UK Forms Product Pages consist of the main product page content used for onboarding new users of GOV.UK Forms, and its supporting pages (for example, the accessibility statement and privacy policy). It is implemented as a Rails app.

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.

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-product-page.git
cd forms-product-page

# 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

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 Ruby code. To autocorrect issues, run:

bundle exec rubocop -A

We use JavaScript Standard Style for our JavaScript code:

npm run lint

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

Changing configuration

Changing settings

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

To override file based settings through Machine based env variables settings, you can run:

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

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-product-page app is containerised (see Dockerfile) and can be deployed in the same way you'd 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

• You should configure HTTP access logs in the application config, using Lograge.
• You should use the LogEventService and EventLogger to create any custom log messages. This is independent of any Lograge configuration.
• The output format is JSON, using the JsonLogFormatter to enable simpler searching and visbility, especially in Splunk.
• Do not use log_tags, as 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.