// the find
bbc/simorgh
The BBC's Open Source Web Application. Contributions welcome! Used on some of our biggest websites, e.g.
Simorgh is the production React/Next.js codebase BBC uses to render World Service News articles and AMP pages across 41 languages, serving millions of readers monthly. It's for people who want to see how a newsroom handles i18n, AMP, and accessibility at genuine scale, not a framework meant to be installed elsewhere.
The test setup is unusually complete for a frontend repo — Jest unit tests, a full Cypress e2e suite with separate smoke/full modes, Lighthouse checks, and Storybook plus Chromatic for visual regression. It handles real locale complexity well: script variants (zhongwen simp vs trad), RTL languages, UK vs international routing, and parallel AMP/non-AMP rendering for the same article. Governance is solid too — CODEOWNERS, a documented code review process, and GPG signing requirements, which is more than most open repos this size bother with.
Most of what makes the app actually work is gated behind BBC-internal infrastructure: topic pages need an internal API, feature toggles pull from a remote BBC system, and several env vars are only documented behind an access-controlled guide. An outside contributor can run the shell but not see real behavior for a chunk of routes. It's Yarn-only with a pinned Node version via .nvmrc, and every `yarn build` regenerates bundle analysis reports into the repo, which is noisy for diffs. There's no architectural write-up of the rendering/caching pipeline — the docs index is almost entirely process and conduct, not how the system is put together.