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.
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:
# 1. Clone the git repository and change directory to the new folder
git clone [email protected]:alphagov/forms-admin.git
cd forms-admin
# 2. Run the setup script
./bin/setupYou can either run the development task:
# Run the foreman dev server. This will also start the frontend dev task
./bin/devor 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 devYou will also need to run the forms-api service, as this app needs the API to create and access forms.
The app tests are written with rspec-rails and you can run them with:
bundle exec rspecThere are also unit tests for JavaScript code (look for files named *.test.js), written with Vitest. You can run those with:
npm run testWe use RuboCop GOV.UK for linting code. To autocorrect issues run:
bundle exec rubocop -AWe 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 normalizeOn GitHub pull requests, we also check our dependencies for security issues using [bundler-audit]. You can run this locally with:
bundle auditWe 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 rakeTo 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:seedRefer 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
barRefer to the settings file for all the settings required to run this app
| Name | Purpose |
|---|---|
DATABASE_URL |
The URL to the postgres instance (without the database at the end) |
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: trueYou 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: trueAnd 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: trueThe 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).
You can also tag RSpec tests with feature_{name}: true. This will turn that feature on just for the duration of that test.
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
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:
- Sign in to Sentry using your work Google account.
- Create a new project.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
To update the version of Alpine Linux and Ruby used in the Dockerfile, use the update_app_versions.sh script in forms-deploy
Raise a GitHub issue if you need support.
We welcome contributions - please read CONTRIBUTING.md and the alphagov Code of Conduct before contributing.
We use the MIT License.
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