UK Public Sector GitHub Observatory
Every claim here is measured against the file tree at HEAD and the commit history, for the 156 live repositories with real history. Archived repositories are excluded from the scorecards: judging a 2013 prototype against a 2026 standard tells you nothing useful.
Practice at a glance
What stands out
RFC-123 made GitHub Actions the preferred CI platform, and the file system agrees: 129 of 156 live repositories carry a workflow.
0 repositories carry a Jenkinsfile and 0 a .travis.yml, but among live repositories that falls to 0 and 0 respectively. GOV.UK does still run Jenkins for deployment where the manual says platform integration requires it - that machinery simply is not in these public repositories.
The manual is explicit: merge via the GitHub UI so the PR number lands in the merge commit. 38.9k of 53.7k merge commits carry that signature, which is unusually high discipline for an estate this old and this large.
Only 14.0% of commits use the feat:/fix: prefix convention, against 29% that reference a ticket identifier. GOV.UK's manual does not mandate Conventional Commits, and the history shows a house style of plain-English subjects averaging 48 characters.
main.1 still default to master - almost entirely archived repositories frozen before the 2020 rename became standard.
Continuous integration
CI platform, whole estate
Counted across all repositories with history, including archived ones, so the historical platforms are visible.
Repository hygiene
Community health and documented conventions
Live repositories only. Bars are coloured by adoption: green above 75%, yellow above 45%, pink above 20%, red below.
Tooling and testing
Build, container and test tooling
Live repositories only. Language-specific items are naturally capped by the share of repositories in that language.
How commits are written
Commit message habits
Out of 270.7k commits across the whole estate.
Most-referenced ticket prefixes
The trace of the issue trackers GDS has used over fifteen years.