Rails Feature Toggles Example

This is an example from my talk When you say DevOps showing how simple it is to implement feature toggles yourself and start growing them for your needs from there. This can be constrasted with third-party solution (library or service) which can bring unnecessary complexity to your project especially if you and your team are still learning how powerfull feature toggles can be.

There are three important moments in this repository with regard to feature toggles:

1. Introduction of simple Feature module
2. Support for tests to override of feature config
3. Branching by feature toggle saas_greet

All this can evolve in many ways. You can autoload the feature library. Optimize YAML loading and parsing on every enabled? call. Support for aditional source of feature toggle like HTTP cookies or sessions. Enable features only for some clients by saying 30% instead of simple true or false. Integrate it with your analytics. The possibilities are endless.

But remember, you do not need branches for intensive in-house product development where you have high levels of trust and ability to spot defect quickly. There are already different branches on each developer’s machine and on every stage of delivery pipeline. Introducing even more branches is useless and actually introduces unnecessary complexity. If you need to branch your code, there better and more powerful ways. This my point here and is part of my war cry during When you say DevOps talk.