Publish your prototype online

Publishing your prototype online means you can:

  • share it with others, such as colleagues
  • test it with users

You'll need a hosting service to publish prototypes online.

Hosting services

The NHS.UK prototype kit runs on any hosting service that supports Node.js.

Your organisation may already use a hosting service for the prototype kit. Check with your digital team about which platform to use.

For example:

In Railway, you need to set the command to get started. Go to Settings > Deploy and set it to npm run start.

Some hosting services may automatically deploy your prototype every time you merge new changes in the connected GitHub repository. You may be able to enable automatic deploys. If it hasn't automatically update your prototype, you will need to do this manually.

Setting a password

When running the prototype kit online, you must set a username and password. This is to stop anyone accidentally finding your prototype and mistaking it for a real service.

To set a password, check your hosting services documentation on how to set "environment variables". (It may have a slightly different name like "config vars" or "variables".)

Set environment variables. For example:

PROTOTYPE_USERNAMEnameofservice

PROTOTYPE_PASSWORDyourpassword123

In Railway, you also need to create:

  • a variable called NODE-ENV and set the value to production
  • a variable called USE_AUTH with the value of true

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How to guides