18F's flagship website

A fresh start for 18f.gsa.gov. Online at beta.18f.gov. We use the Draft U.S. Web Design standards as a frontend framework. The site is built and served through the Federalist platform. A detailed history of the work that went into developing this redesign can be found at 18F/beta.18f.gov and an archived copy of the original website, can be found on a Federalist preview.

Installation

Run each of the following steps to get the site up and running.

1. git clone git@github.com:18F/18f.gsa.gov
2. cd 18f.gsa.gov
3. bundle install
4. bundle exec jekyll serve

To dramatically speed up rebuild times (from more than 20 seconds to around 5), you can also run ./serve or ./build for step 4. These are shorthand for a combination of commands that disable certain plugins. This is especially useful if you're drafting a blog post or formatting single pages. With this method you will disable search and all archives.

You should be able to see the site at: http://127.0.0.1:4000

System security controls

The site is a static website with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Deployments are done through the Federalist platform.

1. Federalist runs in its own organization and space in CloudFoundry
2. Federalist Admin: https://federalist.18f.gov/
3. Using the Federalist editor that requires GitHub Oauth and writes commits as auth'd GitHub user, changes are then passed through a webhook back to Federalist
4. Federalist uses a CloudFoundry S3 service to write to the bucket, the Federalist instance only derives S3 credentials from the CloudFoundry S3 service and can only read/write to federalist.18f.gov/*
5. Federalist responds to a webhook on GitHub and runs Jekyll to generate static web files and puts them in an S3 bucket
6. We map 18f.gsa.gov URL to the S3 bucket

Protected branches

Any 18F team member should be able to make a branch of the site and submit a pull request. Doing so will also generate a preview URL we can use to inspect your changes. The master staging and production branches are protected this means that only administrators of the repo can push directly to those branches. 18F teammates who don't think they have the correct permissions should hit us up in the #18f-site channel.

Constraints

• We use Cloudfront to map 18f.gsa.gov to an S3 endpoint
• IE 9 and above
• Federalist, and Cloudfront do not support the following HTTPS implementations:
  • HSTS Headers
  • HTTP/2
  • OSCP Stapling