If you encounter any difficulties or problems with govuk-guix, please open an issue.
To access locally running services, the local DNS configuration must
resolve domains like *.dev.gov.uk to your local machine, if this is
not setup, see the DNS Setup section for guidance on how
to do this.
When using govuk-guix, you can either start all services, or a subset of all services and their dependencies. To start all services, run:
govuk system start
To start only certain services, and their dependencies, list those services after the start command, for example:
govuk system start short-url-manager publisher
The Signon application is used for authentication by other
applications, and also provides links to those applications to which
you have access. A user is automatically created, with access to all
applications with the email address dev@dev.gov.uk. The passphrase
randomly generated and saved so that it is the same when govuk system is run again. You can find out what the passphrase is by
running the govuk system passphrase command.
If local DNS is configigured, and the system started successfully, Signon should now be reachable at:
http://signon.dev.gov.uk:50080/
The port is intentionally non-standard (50080 rather than 80) to avoid issues around binding to low ports, and conflicts with other services using ports on the default network interface. This is a temporary workaround until more complex networking support is available.
At this point, you have a GOV.UK system running locally with many of
the services that you might expect. The software behind these services
sits within the /gnu/store and cannot be modified. For guidance in
starting systems for developing services, see the section on
sharing files for local development.
The govuk system start command supports the --share option. This
uses the same syntax that can be used with the guix system container
command.
Modifying the code for a service within a running system depends on what service it is, and at the moment this may be infeasible for some services.
For services using rails, it should be possible to share the source directory in to a running system, modify the files outside of the system, and for those changes to affect the running service.
For example, for the short-url-manager service if you share the source
directory from the host system (assumed to be
/home/dev/govuk/short-url-manager), in to the isolated system
started by govuk system start at the /var/apps/short-url-manager
location, the short-url-manager service will run using the code from
the host system, rather than that contained within the /gnu/store.
To do this, the share option would be:
--share=/home/dev/govuk/short-url-manager=/var/apps/short-url-manager
GOV.UK services are usually deployed to separate domains, e.g. the
Signon service is accessible at
signon.publishing.service.gov.uk. Doing similarly for local
devleopment can be convenient, but does require setting up the DNS
configuration for your machine.
The Development VM created by using govuk-puppet has DNS setup through
govuk-puppet, and this should work for using govuk-guix.
The DNS is configured through the /etc/hosts file.
NetworkManager is commonly used to manage networking on free software operating systems, e.g. Ubuntu.
NetworkManager can use dnsmasq for DNS. dnsmasq provides a easy way of
setting up DNS for any dev.gov.uk subdomain.
Setting this up can differ between systems depending on how the
NetworkManager configuration is managed. Assuming that the
NetworkManager configuration is in /etc/NetworkManager, add or
change the value for dns to dnsmasq in the main section of
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf. For example, if the
configuration file looks like:
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile
[ifupdown]
managed=true
To have NetworkManager use dnsmasq for DNS, add the line dns=dnsmasq.
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile
dns=dnsmasq
[ifupdown]
managed=true
To configure the dev.gov.uk domain, create a file called
dev.gov.uk.conf in /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d. In that file,
put the following.
address=/dev.gov.uk/127.0.0.1