How to build a GDS website: Part 1

I’m a Full-Stack developer who has had extensive experience working with various government organisations working on numerous GDS driven applications using technologies like Nunjucks, Node.js, Angular etc.

Apart from the official documents (which in my opinion is not good), there are no tutorials out there which properly explain how to setup a GDS website from scratch and continue maintaining it as the code base expands. That's exactly what i'm going to be doing here.

Most of the places building GDS websites prefer not to use client-side javascript and hence as part of this tutorial, I will be using only server-side technologies such as:

• Node/express — serving the website/routing engine
• Nunjucks — templating engine

I will be assuming that you’re familiar with the above technologies. So, lets begin!

Initialize project and install necessary packages

Create an empty directory and run npm init to initialize your node project. Enter whatever details you prefer for the project and once completed this will create the package.json file within the directory.

Next, we will install all the basic necessary npm packages

npm i govuk-frontend express nunjucks --save