Should the prototype kit be or have a github template?

[vickytnz]

The current NHSDigital codespace - our preferred code organisation for prototype code - has a public template for most other stuff. https://github.com/NHSDigital/repository-template

Having a template would also help a lot with the instructions for codespaces which generally offer examples as a template https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/getting-started/quickstart

Joe Lanman's example of a codespace for the govuk prototype kit is also a template https://github.com/joelanman/govuk-prototype-kit-prototype

This could also help with the issue of people forking when they should clone?

[frankieroberto]

I’ve considered this a bit too. It’s something we for the X-GOVUK design history project, see https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-design-history-template

It could make sense to do this after publishing an npm package which contains most of the code for the kit. Then we’d have:

• a repo for building and publishing the kit itself
• the existing NHS Frontend repo and package
• a template repo for an Express app which uses both the kit (as middleware) and NHS Frontend (css, JavaScript and nunjucks templates and macros)

That would then make prototypes far easier to update (via npm) and would let us separate out the files in the kit used for developing it (eg the tests and linter setup) from files that are useful to have within prototypes themselves.

More moving parts though! And there might be limits to what can be handled purely as Express middleware.