index.html.md.erb

---
title: GDS technical guidance
---

# <%= current_page.data.title %>

This site documents some of the technical decisions that the
[Government Digital Service](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service)
has made for the products we operate.

It complements the [Service Manual](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual) which
covers service design more broadly.

If you think that you can contribute a change to this repository which reflects
current practice at GDS, make a pull request to this repo and we'll discuss it
at the Tech Ops Forum meeting and in the
[#tech-ops-forum Slack channel](https://govuk.slack.com/messages/tech-ops-forum/).

Products at GDS must follow the
[discovery, alpha, beta and live phases set out in the Service Manual](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/agile-delivery).
Products at discovery and alpha can optionally follow the standards
in this repository. Projects at beta and live should follow these standards.

## Standards

Standards are based on formal decisions made by the tech forum.
They have an expiry date to ensure we review decisions and see if they
are still working for us as an organization.

### Building software

- [Choosing programming languages](standards/programming-languages.html)
- [Storing source code](standards/source-code.html)

### Operating services

- [Managing DNS](standards/dns-hosting.html)
- [Monitoring your service](standards/monitoring.html)
- [Operating systems](standards/operating-systems.html)
- [Responding to problems](standards/alerting.html)
- [Sending emails](standards/sending-email.html)
- [Storing and querying logs](standards/logging.html)

## Manuals

Manuals are informative guides, not necessarily based on any formal
decision or standard.

- [Programming language style guides](manuals/programming-languages.html)
- [Setting up logging](manuals/logging.html)

## Adding new guidance

Create a new Markdown file that follows this pattern and make a pull request:

```markdown
---
title: Thing you're writing a standard about
expires: yyyy-mm-dd (6 months from now)
---

# <%%= current_page.data.title %>

<%%= partial :expires %>

Introduction of a couple of paragraphs to explain why the thing you're
writing a standard about is important.

## User needs

Why do we do this thing? Who is it helping?

## Principles

What broad approaches do we follow when we do this thing?

## Tools

What specific bits of software (commercial or open source) do
we use to help us do this thing?
```

The service manual has some useful information on
[learning about and writing user needs](https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-research/start-by-learning-user-needs).