Feature Toggling With LaunchDarkly

Seamlessly rolling out new features to your application users

With any large scale software project, there are multiple avenues to consider when it comes to deployment: whether to ship your new software all at once, roll out the project in phases, or release a canary into the coal mines.

With all-at-once delivery, your new product will be presented to users in a single, “big bang” release. This would be the quickest approach, but yields large room for error which may come back to bite the development team further down the line. On the other hand, a phased migration takes longer to complete, but offers extra protection with smaller, incremental releases and feedback from customers earlier in the development process.

Following a phased rollout strategy means development teams need the ability to easily enable and disable new features. This is where LaunchDarkly proves useful, allowing us to create feature flags to seamlessly show and hide functionality. LaunchDarkly provides a UI for toggle management along with a wide range of SDKs for easy integration into our application code. Let’s take advantage of LaunchDarkly’s 14-day free trial to explore how this works.

How Do I Create a Feature Flag?

Starting with the UI console, LaunchDarkly configures a default project with two environments: Production and Test. We can alternate between these environments using the project drop-down at the…