AI.gov.uk site

This is our repository for our public website. The intent of this site is to give us a public space for showcasing our work, news about the team, upcoming jobs and interesting commercial partnerships.

Please note that this is a continuous work-in-progress and we will continue to improve the website.

Getting Started

To get started with the site, use the below commands to build and run the site. This assumes that you already have node installed.

Create a .env file based on the .env_example.

To deploy the site, only the _site folder is needed.

1. npm install
2. npx @11ty/eleventy --serve
3. Or to build css and run the app locally use npm run dev
4. You can also use npm run build to build the _site folder

Environment Variables

CMS Credentials

For local development without CMS access, you can use test credentials in your .env file:

CONTENTFUL_SPACE=test
CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN=test
PREVIEW_ACCESS_TOKEN=test

When using these test credentials:

• The site will run with static placeholder data
• Blogs will show as an empty array
• Projects will display default examples
• FAQs and Jobs will show as empty arrays
• All CMS-related functionality will be disabled

This is useful for:

• Local development without CMS access
• Testing site functionality
• Development of new features that don't require CMS data
• Quick setup for new developers

For full functionality with real data, replace these test values with actual CMS credentials.

Cached stylesheets and JavaScript

To prevent browser caching issues (which can otherwise occur even after invalidating the cache), the Eleventy build renames CSS and JS files that change regularly. Additional files can be added to this within .eleventy.js.

Tests

To run the tests, use the below commands from the root of this project.

1. cd tests
2. npx playwright test

Content Management System (CMS)

DecapCMS is our main CMS. Contentful still has some older content which isgradually being moved over. You will need to add the required values to your .env for both of these.

Blogs preview

To preview unpublished blogs, set const USE_PREVIEW = true; in src/_data/blogs.js. Please do not commit this change. The longer-term plan is to set this automatically based on the environment.

Backing up CMS data

This is for the old CMS, which still contains some data. Our new CMS is backed up automatically.

1. Install Contentful using npm install -g contentful-cli
2. Login using npx contentful-cli login
3. Run cd contentful-backups followed by npx contentful-cli space export --space-id [space-id] (the space ID should be in your .env file)