An API to submit and review applications to the housing register. Using the Base API as boilerplate code.

🚀 Swagger (Edit it here)

• .NET Core as a web framework.
• nUnit as a test framework.
• DynamoDB for a data store.

• Gov.uk Notify
• Evidence API
• Activity History API

1. Install Docker.
2. Install AWS CLI.
3. Clone this repository.
4. Open it in your IDE.

To serve the application, run it using your IDE of choice, we use Visual Studio CE and JetBrains Rider on Mac.

Note When running locally the appropriate database connection details are still needed.

Repository has pre-commit hooks configuration to prevent direct commits to main branches and for scanning secrets. Please ensure you have pre-commit framework installed before starting development work.

To use a local instance of DynamoDb, this can be installed or run via Docker.

The following command will start up a new Docker container with DynamoDb.

docker-compose up -d dynamodb-database

To check that a local DynamoDb instance is up and has valid data, you can use the AWS CLI:

aws dynamodb list-tables --endpoint-url http://localhost:8000

If you would like to see what is in your local DynamoDb instance using a GUI, then this admin tool or NoSQL workbench are good tools for this.

The application can also be served locally using docker.

Build and serve the application. It will be available in the port 5000.

$ make build && make serve

The application uses GOV.UK Notify to send emails.

When running the application locally we make calls to the Notify service and so you need to:

1. Ask to be invited to the Housing Register applications service as a team member to access the Notify dashboard
2. Update your local .env file with the correct values for the properties NOTIFY_TEMPLATE_VERIFY_CODE* and NOTIFY_API_KEY (these should use the development API key)

We use a pull request workflow, where changes are made on a branch and approved by one or more other maintainers before the developer can merge into master branch.

Then we have an automated six step deployment process, which runs in CircleCI.

1. Automated tests (nUnit) are run to ensure the release is of good quality.
2. The application is deployed to development automatically, where we check our latest changes work well.
3. We manually confirm a staging deployment in the CircleCI workflow once we're happy with our changes in development.
4. The application is deployed to staging.
5. We manually confirm a production deployment in the CircleCI workflow once we're happy with our changes in staging.
6. The application is deployed to production.

Our staging and production environments are hosted by AWS. We would deploy to production per each feature/config merged into master branch.

To help with making changes to code easier to understand when being reviewed, we've added a PR template. When a new PR is created on a repo that uses this API template, the PR template will automatically fill in the Open a pull request description textbox. The PR author can edit and change the PR description using the template as a guide.

FxCop runs code analysis when the Solution is built.

Both the API and Test projects have been set up to treat all warnings from the code analysis as errors and therefore, fail the build.

However, we can select which errors to suppress by setting the severity of the responsible rule to none, e.g dotnet_analyzer_diagnostic.<Category-or-RuleId>.severity = none, within the .editorconfig file. Documentation on how to do this can be found here.

$ make test

To run database tests locally (e.g. via Visual Studio), then a local instance of DynamoDB will need to be running.

The required tables and data will be initialised as part of the test.

• Use nUnit, FluentAssertions and Moq
• Always follow a TDD approach
• Tests should be independent of each other
• Gateway tests should interact with a real test instance of the database
• Test coverage should never go down
• All use cases should be covered by E2E tests
• Optimise when test run speed starts to hinder development
• Unit tests and E2E tests should run in CI
• Test database schemas should match up with production database schema
• Have integration tests which test from the DynamoDB database to API Gateway

• Selwyn Preston, Lead Developer at London Borough of Hackney (selwyn.preston@hackney.gov.uk)
• Mirela Georgieva, Lead Developer at London Borough of Hackney (mirela.georgieva@hackney.gov.uk)
• Matt Keyworth, Lead Developer at London Borough of Hackney (matthew.keyworth@hackney.gov.uk)

• Thomas Morris, Senior Developer at Manifesto (thomas.morris@hackney.gov.uk)
• Tony Gledhill, Senior Developer at Manifesto (anthony.gledhill@hackney.gov.uk)

• Rashmi Shetty, Product Owner at London Borough of Hackney (rashmi.shetty@hackney.gov.uk)