Ember Launch Darkly

This addon wraps the Launch Darkly feature flagging service and provides helpers to implement feature flagging in your application

Compatibility

Addon version	Ember version
v3.0	>= v3.28 and v4.4	README
v2.0	>= v3.17	README
<= v1.0	<= v3.16	README

Table of Contents

• Ember Launch Darkly
  • Compatibility
  • Table of Contents
  • Installation
  • Configuration
    • clientSideId (required)
    • mode
    • localFlags
    • streamingFlags
    • bootstrap
    • Launch Darkly specific config
  • Usage
    • Initialize
    • Identify
    • variation (template helper)
    • variation (javascript helper)
  • Local feature flags
  • Streaming feature flags
  • Content Security Policy
  • Test helpers
    • Acceptance tests
    • Integration tests
  • Upgrading to v2.0

Installation

ember install ember-launch-darkly

Configuration

ember-launch-darkly can be configured from config/environment.js as follows:

module.exports = function (environment) {
  let ENV = {
    launchDarkly: {
      // options
    },
  };

  return ENV;
};

ember-launch-darkly supports the following configuration options:

clientSideId (required)

The client-side ID generated by Launch Darkly which is available in your account settings page. See the Launch Darkly docs for more information on how the client side ID is used.

mode

The mode in which the Launch Darkly client will run, either local or remote. When running in remote mode, feature flags will be fetched from the Launch Darkly service as you'd expect. This is the mode you want to be running in in production.

When running in local mode, feature flags will be fetched from the localFlags defined in the config. This is likely appropriate when running the app locally, or in an external environment for which you don't have Launch Darkly setup. It allows you to have a sandboxed feature flag set that is not dependent on the Launch Darkly service or the state of the flags stored in Launch Darkly itself.

Default: local

Possible Values: local, remote

localFlags

A list of initial values for your feature flags. This property is only used when mode: 'local' to populate the list of feature flags for environments such as local development where it's not desired to fetch the flags from Launch Darkly.

Default: null

streamingFlags

Streaming options for the feature flags for which you'd like to subscribe to real-time updates. See the Streaming Feature Flags section for more detailed info on what the possible options are for streaming flags.

Default: false

bootstrap

The Launch Darkly client supports the idea of bootstrapping your feature flags with an initial set of values so that the variation function can be called before the flags have been fetched from Launch Darkly.

If the bootstrap property is set to localFlags, ember-launch-darkly will use the flags specified in localFlags as the bootstrap flag values passed to Launch Darkly. Other than that, the bootstrap property will be passed directly through to Launch Darkly.

Default: null

Possible Values: localFlags otherwise whatever Launch Darkly expects based on its Bootstrapping documentation.

Launch Darkly specific config

Any other properties passed in as configuration will be passed straight through to Launch Darkly.

Possible Values: As documented in the section titled "Customizing your client" in the Launch Darkly documentation.

A note on sendEventsOnlyForVariation. When this flag is set to false, then events are sent, for every single feature flag, to Launch Darkly when client.allFlags() is called. An event is what tells Launch Darkly when a flag was last requested, which is how you can tell on the feature flags list, which flags were requested and when. This can be misleading because a user didn't actually request a flag, it was ember-launch-darkly that requested allFlags which is needed to know which flags exist. This could be confusing if a version of your code no longer has references to a feature flag but it still exists in Launch Darkly. You may see that the flag was requested even though there is no code in the wild that actually should be requesting it. Therefore, ember-launch-darkly sets this flag to true to avoid sending those events when we fetch allFlags. You are, however, welcome to set it back to false in the config if you wish - just know that this means you'll be seeing "Requested at" times for flags that you may not expect.

Usage

Initialize

Before being used, Launch Darkly must be initialized. This should happen early so choose an appropriate place to make the call such as an application initializer or the application route.

The initialize() function returns a promise that resolves when the Launch Darkly client is ready so Ember will wait until this happens before proceeding.

This function's API mirrors that of the Launch Darkly client, so see the Launch Darkly docs on initializing the client for more info.

// /app/routes/application.js

import Route from '@ember/routing/route';

import config from 'my-app/config/environment';

import { initialize } from 'ember-launch-darkly';

export default class ApplicationRoute extends Route {
  async model() {
    let user = {
      key: 'aa0ceb',
    };

    let { clientSideId, ...rest } = config;

    return await initialize(clientSideId, user, rest);
  }
}

Identify

If you initialized Launch Darkly with an anonymous user and want to re-initialize it for a specific user to receive the flags for that user, you can use identify. This must be called after initialize has been called.

// /app/routes/session.js

import Route from '@ember/routing/route';
import { inject as service } from '@ember/service';

import { identify } from 'ember-launch-darkly';

export default class SessionRoute extends Route {
  @service session;

  model() {
    return this.session.getSession();
  },

  async afterModel(session) {
    let user = {
      key: session.user.id,
      firstName: session.user.firstName,
      email: session.user.email
    };

    return await identify(user);
  }
}

variation (template helper)

ember-launch-darkly provides a variation helper to check your feature flags in your handlebars templates.

If your feature flag is a boolean based flag, you might use it in an {{if}} like so:

{{#if (variation 'new-login-screen')}}
  {{login-screen}}
{{else}}
  {{old-login-screen}}
{{/if}}

If your feature flag is a multivariate based flag, you might use it in an {{with}} like so:

{{#with (variation "new-login-screen") as |variant|}}
  {{#if (eq variant "login-screen-a")}
    {{login-screen-a}}
  {{else if (eq variant "login-screen-b")}}
    {{login-screen-b}}
  {{/if}}
{{else}}
  {{login-screen}}
{{/with}}

variation (javascript helper)

If your feature flag is a boolean based flag, you might use it in a function like so:

// /app/components/login-page/component.js

import Component from '@ember/component';

import { variation } from 'ember-launch-darkly';

export default class LoginPageComponent extends Component {
  get price() {
    if (variation('new-price-plan')) {
      return 99.0;
    }

    return 199.0;
  }
}

If your feature flag is a multivariate based flag, you might use it in a function like so:

// /app/components/login-page/component.js

import Component from '@ember/component';

import { variation } from 'ember-launch-darkly';

export default class LoginPageComponent extends Component {
  get price() {
    switch (variation('new-pricing-plan')) {
      case 'plan-a':
        return 99.00;
      case 'plan-b':
        return 89.00
      case 'plan-c':
        return 79.00
      default:
        return 199.00;
    }
  }
});

Because ember-launch-darkly is built for Ember Octane, its feature flags are tracked. This means that when using the variation helper, if a flag value changes, code that references it will be automatically recomputed.

Local feature flags

When mode: 'local' is set in the Launch Darkly configuration, ember-launch-darkly will retrieve the feature flags and their values from config/environment.js instead of the Launch Darkly service. This is useful for development purposes so you don't need to set up a new environment in Launch Darkly, your app doesn't need to make a request for the flags, and you can easily change the value of the flags from the browser console.

The local feature flags are defined in config/environment.js like so:

let ENV = {
  launchDarkly: {
    mode: 'local',
    localFlags: {
      'apply-discount': true,
      'new-pricing-plan': 'plan-a',
    },
  },
};

When mode: 'local', the Launch Darkly flags context is available in the JS console via window.__LD__. The context object provides the following helper methods to manipulate feature flags:

> window.__LD__.get('new-pricing-plan', 'plan-a') // return the current value of the feature flag providing a default ('plan-a' if it doesn't exist (the default is optional)

> window.__LD__.set('new-pricing-plan', 'plan-x') // set the variation value

> window.__LD__.enable('apply-discount') // helper to set the return value to `true`
> window.__LD__.disable('apply-discount') // helper to set the return value to `false`

> window.__LD__.allFlags // return the current list of feature flags and their values

> window.__LD__.user // return the user that the client has been initialized with

Persisting local feature flags

When mode: 'local' there is also an option to 'persist' the flags to localStorage. This could be useful if you don't want to enable a flag yet for other users, but need it to be enabled for your own scenario.

//setting the flag as usual
> window.__LD__.set('stringFlag', 'goodbye')

// this persists all the set flags to localStorage, so when the page is refreshed they are loaded from there
> window.__LD__.persist()

//to unset the flags you can use
> window.__LD__.resetPersistence()

Streaming feature flags

Launch Darkly supports the ability to subscribe to changes to feature flags so that apps can react in real-time to these changes. The streamingFlags configuration option allows you to specify, in a couple of ways, which flags you'd like to stream.

To disable streaming completely, use the following configuration:

launchDarkly: {
  streamingFlags: false;
}

Note, this is the default behaviour if the streamingFlags option is not specified.

To stream all flags, use the following configuration:

launchDarkly: {
  streamingFlags: true;
}

To get more specific, you can select to stream all flags except those specified:

launchDarkly: {
  streamingFlags: {
    allExcept: ['apply-discount', 'new-login'];
  }
}

And, finally, you can specify only which flags you would like to stream:

launchDarkly: {
  streamingFlags: {
    'apply-discount': true
  }
}

As Launch Darkly's real-time updates to flags uses the Event Source API, certain browsers will require a polyfill to be included. ember-launch-darkly uses EmberCLI targets to automatically decide whether or not to include the polyfill. Ensure your project contains a valid config/targets.js file if you require this functionality.

Content Security Policy

If you have CSP enabled in your ember application, you will need to add Launch Darkly to the connect-src like so:

// config/environment.js

module.exports = function (environment) {
  let ENV = {
    //snip

    contentSecurityPolicy: {
      'connect-src': ['https://*.launchdarkly.com'],
    },

    //snip
  };
};

Test helpers

Acceptance tests

Add the setupLaunchDarkly hook to the top of your test file. This will ensure that Launch Darkly uses defaults your feature flags to false instead of using what is defined in the localFlags config. This allows your tests to start off in a known default state.

import { module, test } from 'qunit';
import { visit, currentURL, click } from '@ember/test-helpers';
import { setupApplicationTest } from 'ember-qunit';

import { setupLaunchDarkly } from 'ember-launch-darkly/test-support';

module('Acceptance | Homepage', function (hooks) {
  setupApplicationTest(hooks);
  setupLaunchDarkly(hooks);

  test('links go to the new homepage', async function (assert) {
    await visit('/');
    await click('a.pricing');

    assert.equal(
      currentRoute(),
      'pricing',
      'Should be on the old pricing page'
    );
  });
});

ember-launch-darkly provides a test helper, withVariation, to make it easy to turn feature flags on and off in acceptance tests.

module('Acceptance | Homepage', function (hooks) {
  setupApplicationTest(hooks);
  setupLaunchDarkly(hooks);

  test('links go to the new homepage', async function (assert) {
    await this.withVariation('new-pricing-plan', 'plan-a');

    await visit('/');
    await click('a.pricing');

    assert.equal(
      currentRoute(),
      'pricing',
      'Should be on the old pricing page'
    );
  });
});

Integration tests

Use the setupLaunchDarkly hook and withVariation helper in component tests to control feature flags as well.

import { module, test } from 'qunit';
import { setupRenderingTest } from 'ember-qunit';
import { render } from '@ember/test-helpers';
import hbs from 'htmlbars-inline-precompile';

import { setupLaunchDarkly } from 'ember-launch-darkly/test-support';

module('Integration | Component | foo', function (hooks) {
  setupRenderingTest(hooks);
  setupLaunchDarkly(hooks);

  test('new pricing', async function (assert) {
    await render(hbs`
      {{#if (variation "new-pricing-page")}}
        <h1 class="price">£ 99</h1>
      {{else}}
        <h1 class="price">£ 199</h1>
      {{/if}}
    `);

    await this.withVariation('new-pricing-page');

    assert.equal(
      this.element.querySelector('.price').textContent.trim(),
      '£ 99',
      'New pricing displayed'
    );
  });
});

Upgrading to v2.0

v2.0 of the addon is built for Ember Octane (>= v3.17) and beyond. It contains breaking changes from the previous releases. If you would like to upgrade from v1.0 or earlier, please following the instructions in UPGRADING_TO_v2.x.md file.

_{Made with ❤️ by The Ember Launch Darkly Team}

Upgrading to v3.0

Below you can find a list of deprecations, most of them should already be working correctly with modern ember apps:

• Dropped node support below v16
• Dropped ember support below LTS v3.28 and 4.4

Deprecations

• The Context exposed an undocumented getter user which returned the value of Launchdarkly's getUser() helper. With Launchdarkly's v3 release, getUser() has been removed in favor of getContext(). Both should return the same, so for now we replaced it to just return getContext(). We still recommend using the native helpers as much as possible since the client is exposed through the addon. This avoids breaking changes in the addon in the future. We will remove the user getter in the next major release.