GOV.UK Component Guide

Component guides now live within applications and are generated using the govuk_publishing_components gem. This application is being retired.

A list of all component guides is available here: https://docs.publishing.service.gov.uk/manual/components.html. Static components are listed here: https://govuk-static.herokuapp.com/component-guide/

A living style guide and documentation for GOV.UK Components — A new approach to sharing UI patterns between applications without having to duplicate code.

Caveats

It's still in it's early stages, many features are missing or incomplete, and documentation may not be 100% accurate.

It depends on Slimmer and makes API calls to Static.

Installation

It's a pretty standard Rails app, clone it, bundle it.

Running

$ PLEK_SERVICE_STATIC_URI=assets.digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk ./startup.sh

If running on a VM, then Rails needs to be bound to 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost so that it can be accessed outside of the VM. This is if using startup.sh but if running bundle exec rails s yourself you'll need to bind the port manually.

The application will start on port 3113, so to access it visit 0.0.0.0:3113 or dev.gov.uk:3113 on a VM.

The PLEK_SERVICE_STATIC_URI environment variable points to a public instance of alphagov/static - This is where the component documentation used to generate the dynamic parts of this guide is fetched from. Pointing at different static hosts may show different components.

Running against local static

If you'd like to run the component guide against a different version of static, for example, where you've added, or made changes to, components, you'll need to run a copy of static locally.

To get a local copy of alphagov/static, follow the installation and local running instructions there, then run the component guide with this command:

$ PLEK_SERVICE_STATIC_URI=http://0.0.0.0:3013 ./startup.sh

Deployment

The app is deployed to a Heroku instance and is continuously deployed, updating whenever master changes and CI passes.

To access the Heroku admin, add yourself through the shared [email protected] account, or ask a contributor to add you.

Environment vars

These are required when running a production environment

• PLEK_SERVICE_STATIC_URI - as above.
• GOVUK_APP_DOMAIN- set to www.gov.uk