The GOV.UK Mini Environment Admin application can manage mini GOV.UK
environments, deployed mostly on a single machine or system style
container.

A GOV.UK environment is a connected collection of the various
services. A complete environment would include all the publishing and
admin applications, as well as all the other services. When creating a
mini environment, you can choose to omit some services if they are
unnecessary or undesired.

It is possible to create mini environments on the local machine
(through using libvirt), or create them on rented infrastructure (from
Amazon Web Services (AWS)).

* User Documentation



* Developer Documentation

The GOV.UK Mini Environment Admin is a Ruby on Rails web application
for managing mini environments. Terraform is used for the low level
management of the environments, and this is connected to the web
application through the use of the Que qweuing library, and terraform
Ruby library.

** Components

*** Web appliciation

The web application is responsible for:

 - User authenticating via the GDS:SSO Ruby library, which uses the
   GOV.UK Signon service.
 - Providing a easy to deploy mini environments through the Terraform
   configuration.
 - Storing the Terraform state, which Terraform fetches and updates
   using a Rest API.

All the persistent state is stored in a PostgreSQL database.

*** Queue workers

The queuing system uses the Ruby Que library, which stores the state
in the PostgreSQL databae. The queues are where Terraform is run.

*** Terraform configuration

The Terraform configuration is split up by provider (libvirt or AWS).