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Building a tool to improve our GitHub security

Posted by: David King, Posted on: 13 July 2018 - Categories: Tools
security-sign-gds

GitHub plays a major role in the software supply chain at GDS. All our source code is stored in GitHub - mainly in Alphagov - and we work hard to make sure our repositories are secure.

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How to open up closed code

Posted by: Anna Shipman, Posted on: 19 February 2018 - Categories: Open Source

Every digital service designed within government has to meet the Digital Service Standard. One of the requirements of the standard is that new source code should be made open and published under an open source licence.

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How making our deployment code open improved our workflow

Posted by: Jenny Duckett, Posted on: 5 January 2018 - Categories: Open Source
Junior developers working on code

As part of the GDS commitment to code in the open, we have opened up GOV.UK’s application deployment code. This came with a number of challenges but it increased the development team’s efficiency and collaboration. Find out why we opened …

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Don’t be afraid to code in the open: here’s how to do it securely

Posted by: Anna Shipman, Posted on: 27 September 2017 - Categories: Open Source

There are two big concerns government organisations have around making source code open. They want to know which subsets of the code should be kept closed and how to code in the open securely. To address these questions I’ve introduced two pieces of …

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Why we use a ‘docs as code’ approach for technical documentation

Posted by: Jen Lambourne, Posted on: 25 August 2017 - Categories: Tools, Transformation

As technical writers at GDS we create technical documentation which includes instructions and supporting content for the products we build. We want to make our documentation consistent across all products, but also make it easier to work closely with our …

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Updating the GOV.UK Continuous Integration environment

Posted by: Laura Martin, Posted on: 10 February 2017 - Categories: GOV.UK, Tools, Transformation
GOV.UK Infrastruture building sign

  Our team makes sure the GOV.UK infrastructure is up to date and maintained, while also providing infrastructure for new requirements. At the moment it’s our mission to “Upgrade the Things”, which involves a series of major updates to our …

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Easing the process of pull request reviews

Posted by: Paul Bowsher, Posted on: 30 September 2016 - Categories: GOV.UK, Tools

On the GOV.UK team, all our changes are peer reviewed using Github's pull request system. If a developer wants to make a change to one of our projects, they need another developer’s approval before the change is accepted into the …

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How we use Git at the Government Digital Service

Posted by: Alex Muller, Posted on: 31 May 2016 - Categories: Chat, Tools
Screen showing Git commit history

There's an important difference in how we use Git at GDS compared to lots of other organisations. We're very thorough when using version control because we don't want to waste the effort we've put into writing code. If our code …

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Opening GOV.UK's Puppet repository

Posted by: Alex Muller, Posted on: 19 January 2016 - Categories: GOV.UK, Open Source
Make things open it makes things better

Point 8 of the Digital by Default Service Standard that we publish on GOV.UK says that source code for government services should be open and reusable, and our 10th design principle is "Make things open: it makes things better". We …

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How GDS uses git and GitHub

Posted by: James Stewart, Posted on: 27 January 2014 - Categories: Tools

Other teams around government frequently ask us about our use of GitHub, and rather than bury those answers in email it seemed time to follow Mike Bracken’s directive and publish (not send) our answers. I’ve made some assumptions here about …

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