- To reuse content from GOV.UK you must meet the conditions of the Open Government Licence
- Results are returned in JSON
- Requests are unauthenticated
- Please set an identifying user agent if you use it a lot. We'd like to talk to you about your needs!
- https://www.gov.uk/help/reuse-govuk-content
Some people find it useful to use the GOV.UK browser extension to see behind the scenes when navigating around www.gov.uk.
This is the API that provides content for most pages on GOV.UK.
Take any page and insert /api/content between the domain and the path. It returns the JSON that we use to populate that page.
So for:
https://www.gov.uk/council-tax
You should get:
https://www.gov.uk/api/content/council-tax
Further docs: https://content-api.publishing.service.gov.uk/#gov-uk-content-api
We have many different types of content on GOV.UK. The shape of the content returned from the API differs to meet the specific needs of each type.
They can reliably be expected to hold the following properties (with examples from https://gov.uk/council-tax):
{
"base_path": "/council-tax",
"content_id": "428c2bae-56c2-48bd-a917-3d04df0a63fd",
"description": "Your Council Tax bill - how to work it out, who has to pay, discounts and exemptions",
"document_type": "guide",
"first_published_at": "2011-11-08T17:14:12.000+00:00",
"locale": "en",
"phase": "live",
"public_updated_at": "2014-11-21T15:54:42.000+00:00",
"publishing_app": "publisher",
"publishing_scheduled_at": null,
"rendering_app": "government-frontend",
"scheduled_publishing_delay_seconds": null,
"schema_name": "guide",
"title": "Council Tax",
"updated_at": "2019-08-16T23:53:02.920Z",
"withdrawn_notice": {},
"details": {},
"links": {}
}
The details hash is where the information specific to that schema is stored. For /council-tax, it holds the html body for each page in the guide - guides are multiple html pages, but one item in the content API.
The links hash stores associations with other content, for example the organisations responsible for it, or related content that might appear in navigation.
I've removed them from this example because they make the page unwieldly to view, but you can see them by checking out the live content
This is the API that we use for searching on GOV.UK. It also allows us to provide dynamic content on pages like https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service
The link field in any search result is its page path on GOV.UK.
- Prefix it with https://gov.uk to open a web page
- Prefix it with https://gov.uk/api/content to get the content API representation
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?q=micropig
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?q=tax&count=20&start=10
Gets 20 results starting at the tenth.
- Searches with keywords (the
qparameter) are ordered by relevance by default. - Searches without keywords are ordered by "most viewed" over the last 14 days by default.
- You can override this by using the
orderparameter.
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?q=tax&order=-public_timestamp
Do this to limit the response (and make it faster).
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?q=micropig&fields=title,description,link
Fields that are returned by default
- Only includes results from the
hm-revenue-customsorganisation. - Only includes the title (over the minimum)
- Order by most recent to oldest
- Searches for
biscuit - Groups the results by the
content_store_document_typefield- Gets the first 20 content store document types
- Provides two examples of each
- The examples use the query too (they match the search for
biscuit) - Include
title,descriptionfields in the example
- Also get 5 normal search results
Find all the document type internal names:
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?facet_content_store_document_type=200&count=0
Use one to find all the docs of one type (step by step pages in this case):
There may be more than 50 soon!
We're often asked about a people API. We don't have one yet, but you can find them by using variations on:
https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_format=person&order=title
This is a list of "start pages". These are landing pages for government services or tools. There are other places on the website that use the green start button pattern, but these are the "official" ones. https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_content_store_document_type=transaction&fields=link,title,description&count=500
These pages link together a set of guidance and services to help users complete end-to-end journeys, such as learning to drive a car. We implement the HowTo schema on these pages. https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_content_store_document_type=step_by_step_nav&count=100
Lists all organisations on GOV.UK including parent/child organisations and their current status.
https://www.gov.uk/api/organisations
Lists all the governments back to https://www.gov.uk/api/governments/1801-to-1802-tory-government
https://www.gov.uk/api/governments
Check out https://www.registers.service.gov.uk/registers. It's not run by GOV.UK, so may have different terms and conditions to the above.