Simple environmental feature toggling (that works well with Rollout)
Keeping true to twelve-factor application principles http://12factor.net, this simple library uses environment variables, with a straightforward naming convention, to specify feature toggles.
If Rollout https://github.com/jamesgolick/rollout is present, it will pass through most rollout methods except active?, where a preliminary test is done to see if the environment toggle is active first.
When using a continuous delivery process, it is important to try to get all code integrated into the mainline as soon as possible. Feature toggles are favored over feature branches (http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jez-humble-martin-fowler-cd, http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureToggle.html, http://fournines.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/feature-branches-vs-feature-toggles/, and http://blog.jayfields.com/2010/10/experience-report-feature-toggle-over.html) during the dev process (to guard against incomplete features being deployed to production).
Twelve-factor tells us to keep app configuration setting in environment variables. Hence this library adds a tiny bit of convention on how feature toggle env vars are spelled.
As the ultimate acceptance of a feature is the market response, this library has been designed to work with rollout.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'binflip'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install binflip
Set an environment variable following a FEATURE_[name] pattern:
Procfile
FEATURE_CHAT = 1
FEATURE_UPLOAD_VIDEO = 1
(Or set the ENV vars manually)
Then in application setup / initialization:
$toggle = Binflip.new
Check for toggles, using just the [name]:
$toggle.active?(:chat)
$toggle.active?(:upload_video)
NOTE: Absence of feature toggle env variable means the feature is not active.
To use binflip.js, you need to include vendor/assets/javascripts/binflip.js, and have JSON.parse available (use https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json2.js if you are using an old browser). If you are using Rails 3.1 or higher, including the Binflip gem will make it available, just require 'binflip' in your application.js manifest.
The javascript pattern is to build the feature set (for the current user) once during page load, and store the set of features as a data attribute in the <body> tag.
So in your <body> tag, do something like this:
<body data-features='<%= $binflip.active_features(current_user).to_json %>'>
Then you can test for features in your javascript with:
if (Binflip.isActive('feature')) {
alert("Feature is active");
}
Procfile
FEATURE_CHAT = 1
FEATURE_UPLOAD_VIDEO = 1
(Or set the ENV vars manually)
Then in application setup / initialization:
$redis = Redis.new
$rollout = Rollout.new($redis)
$toggle = Binflip.new($rollout)
Check for toggles:
$toggle.active?(:chat, @user)
$toggle.active?(:upload_video, @user)
If Rollout is present, Binflip delegates all methods to it (such as activate_user).
As it is customary to set ENVIRONMENT_VARS in all upcase, environment feature keys are upcase'd. So you must set your env keys to all upcase -- e.g. FEATURE_MY_COOL_FEATURE. But you can test with upcase, lowercase or as a symbol:
$binflip.active?(:my_cool_feature)
$binflip.active?('my_cool_feature')
$binflip.active?('MY_COOL_FEATURE')
These are all equivalent and will test for FEATURE_MY_COOL_FEATURE in the ENV hash. NOTE: this convention is only for ENV and not for rollout.
Copyright (c) 2012 Brian Kaney
MIT License