This is what the Guardian does too. Their frontend is open-source: https://github.com/guardian/frontend
In Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.comguardian
frontend
Scala2013–2021
guardian / frontend
frontend
The Guardian DotCom.
18Distinct people
20Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Guardian DotCom.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year20 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2013-10-01 14:19:55 UTC to 2021-03-15 06:22:45 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Frontend
The backend of the Guardian website frontend.
For everybody who engages with our journalism, theguardian.com is an industry-best news website that is fast, accessible and easy to use. Unlike other ways of developing products, ours puts the audience first.
Frontend is a set of Play Framework 2 Scala applications. It is built in two parts, using make for the client side asset build and SBT for the Play Framework backend.
Frontend's responsibility is to build JSON to pass to the modern rendering service, Dotcom Rendering.
Core Development Principles (lines in the sand)
These principles apply to all requests on www.theguardian.com and api.nextgen.guardianapps.co.uk (our Ajax URL)
Every request can be cached and has an appropriate Cache-Control header set.
Each request may only perform one I/O operation on the backend. (you cannot make two calls to the content API or any other 3rd party)
The average response time of any endpoint is less than 500ms.
Requests that take longer than two seconds will be terminated.
Documentation
All documentation notes and useful items can be found in the docs folder.
New developers
Welcome! How to set up and run frontend.
To get set up, please follow the installation guide.
Fixes for common problems can be found here.
Please read the development tips document to learn about more about development process.
For our deployment process, see how to deploy.
Read the full README on GitHub