HOCS, known in business contexts as DECS, is a tracking and routing tool that “allows Home Office teams to control and audit the flow of all correspondence through its life-cycle from receipt to final response”.

DECS is mostly written in Java, using the Spring Boot library. Frontend components are written using JavaScript, often React.

Most development for DECS is open-source, but coded by developers who work at or for the Home Office.

• Development discussion happens primarily on the internal Home Office Digital slack instance, in the #hocs_sheffield and #decs-dev channels, with secondary discussions happening between developers using a video-conferencing tool.
• Source code is managed by the Git revision control system, with code hosted on GitHub.
• Bug reports are managed via the Home Office's self-hosted instance of Jira.
• Code review is managed using GitHub's merge request functionality.

Almost all HOCS code is open-source and publicly available on GitHub. Some rarely used legacy code is stored in the Home Office's own GitLab instance.

All HOCS code on GitHub is hosted within the UKHomeOffice organisation. You can search the organisation for a list of our repositories. Some repositories are archived, and no longer in use.

Most repositories come in pairs: one containing the codebase, like UKHomeOffice/hocs-info-service, and a counterpart containing the Kubernetes configuration we use to host the application (here, UKHomeOffice/kube-hocs-info-service).

Some parts of the HOCS codebase are not publicly available. This includes the schema used to set up the info-service.

This repository contains a Docker Compose configuration. For information on how to get DECS running in Docker using Docker Compose, look in the docker subdirectory of this repository.