Notion Feature Toggler

Notion Feature Toggler is a lightweight, customizable, and completely free tool for managing feature flags in your application. It is based on the powerful Notion API, making it easy to manage which features are available in your app.

Why?

Why not? All feature toggle providers on the market come with a cost and lack customization options. They rely on unreliable "strings" of names for accessing features, and doesn't really provide any in-code information. Notion Feature Toggler kills these issues, providing a flexible, free, and intuitive way to manage and access feature flags.

Core features

Full customization of the FeatureFlag model

You can easily customize the FeatureFlag model to fit your needs and use this information in your code. For example, you can add a new property to the Notion Database to let everyone know that a new feature may break production, or add a new Person type column to differentiate Feature Flags by who is responsible for them.

Completely free

Unlike other feature toggle providers, the Notion Feature Toggler has no cost at all because it uses the Notion API, which has no limits on the number of requests per time period. If you're developing a startup and using Notion for documentation, this is the easiest and most cost-effective way to manage your features.

Spring Boot and Micronaut starters

The Notion Feature Toggler comes with pre-built integrations for Spring Boot and Micronaut, so you don't have to worry about writing your own notion-toggler-client. Just add the dependency and start using it.

Customizable features refresh-rate

With the Notion Feature Toggler, you have full control over the interval at which the list of features is updated. This allows you to avoid the common problem of not knowing whether a feature is up-to-date or not, and how long to wait for it to be updated. However, please keep in mind the rate limiters of the Notion API, which is 3 seconds.

Gradle plugin

The standard Notion Feature Toggler SDK relies on strings for accessing features, which can be error-prone and hard to maintain. The Gradle Plugin for generating constants over existing Feature Flags makes the system more robust and easier to maintain, and allows you to view information about your features directly in your code.

Usage

1. First, you need to create a new integration in Notion to get an Integration API Token:
   • Go to my-integrations page;
   • Give your integration a name (we recommend using the "-toggler" postfix to avoid confusion);
   • Choose the workspace where you want to store your Feature Flag database;
   • Give your integration the Read Content Capability permission. Notion Toggler only reads your database, no write-operations needed;
   • Click the Submit button and copy your Internal Integration Token.
2. Next, you need to create a database and connect it to your integration:
   • You can duplicate the following database in your Notion workspace: https://industrious-wool-c90.notion.site/Features-548bf64714564bad892132c75515336e;
   • Click the three dots in the top-right corner of the database page, and select "Add Connection". Choose the integration you created in step 1;
   • Optional: If you haven't connected Notion Toggler to your code yet, you can add new properties to your database as needed. For example, you might want to create a new column to store commands for your Feature Toggles.
3. Import Notion Toggler into your project:
   • Spring Boot Starter dependency:

     implementation("com.github.notion-toggler:notion-toggler-spring-boot-starter:1.0.0")

   • Micronaut dependency:

     implementation("com.github.notion-toggler:notion-toggler-micronaut:1.0.0")

   • If you're using a different framework, you can use the core library and implement your own integration:

     implementation("com.github.notion-toggler:notion-toggler-core:1.0.0")

4. Optional: If you created your own custom FF model for your database, you need to duplicate the new properties in your code and inherit from the FeatureFlag base model:
   • TODO: Attach the Kotlin and Notion type mapping table
5. Fill in the application properties:

   • The mandatory properties are:

     notion.toggler.database-name=#the name of your new-brand database
     notion.toggler.token=#your Notion Integration Token

   • The optional properties are:

     notion.toggler.refresh-interval=#value in seconds, must be > 3. Default: 30
     notion.toggler.model-path=#path to your custom FF model, like: io.yahorbarkouski.notion.toggler.spring.CustomFeatureFlag

6. Inject FeatureToggler start using it:

   @Inject
   private val featureToggler: FeatureToggler
     
   fun doSomething() { 
      if (featureToggler.isEnabled("my-feature")) {
           // do something
      }
   }

Samples

TODO

How does it work?

TODO

Gradle Plugin

Gradle plugin for Notion Feature Toggles code generation, supports Kotlin generated files only for now.

Reason

1. Increase the reliability of feature toggles, the default Notion Toggler SDK rely on strings to identify the feature toggles, which is error-prone and hard to maintain.
2. See description, tags, and other meta information directly in the code, which improves the readability of feature toggles in general.
3. It's hard to maintain stale features once using pure Strings, this plugin will help to find out the stale features and remove them from the codebase.

Notes

1. This plugin is not a replacement for the Notion Toggler SDK, it is a code generation tool that generates the Notion SDK code for you.
2. This plugin generates git-tracked sources, so the generation doesn't block developers that does not create new notion features and doesn't want to export their Notion Tokens.
3. It's suggested to use notion-toggler together with ktlint gradle plugins (like kotlinter or ktlint-gradle), to keep the generated code clean and readable. Example configuration:

   tasks.named("generateFeatures") {
      finalizedBy("formatKotlin")
   }

4. By default, this plugin will generate additional documentation for description basic FeatureToggle field, but you could also mark you own custom fields as documented for your futures, by annotating them as io.yahorbarkouski.notion.toggler.core.annotation.Documented annotation.

Installation

You need to add the following lines to your build.gradle.kts file:

plugins { 
  id("io.yahorbarkouski.notion.toggler") version "<latest version from the Gradle plugin portal>"
}

Gradle Task

Usage

gradle generateFeatures

Plugin Extension properties

Property	Default	Type	Description	Required
token	null	String	Notion API Client Token	*
packageName		String?	Package name for the generated files
databaseName	null	String	Notion database name	*
modelPath	null	String	Fully-qualified class name of the feature flag model class	*

Description

This task will generate a $fileName.kt file in the $packageName directory of your project. This file will contain all the feature toggles defined in your Notion database.

Extension example

notionToggler { 
   token = System.getenv("NOTION_TOKEN")
   packageName = "io.yahorbarkouski.chat.notion.constants"
   databaseName = "Features"
   modelPath = "io.yahorbarkouski.chat.notion.model.FeatureFlag"
}

Generated Features example

Contribution

TODO