songkick / dolphin

The friendly feature flipper

Dolphin¶ ↑

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Dolphin is a feature flipper, as Rails plugin. Use it to flip areas of your app on your off, based on pre-defined conditions.

Installation¶ ↑

git submodule add git://github.com/grillpanda/dolphin.git vendor/plugins/dolphin
git submodule init
git submodule update

Or

script/plugin install git://github.com/grillpanda/dolphin.git

Configuration¶ ↑

Define your flippers¶ ↑

You’ll need to add some flippers. These are called later by the feature helper and determine whether a feature should be visible or not.

Dolphin has the flippers enabled and disabled baked in. These return true and false respectively.

In config/initializers/dolphin.rb:

Dolphin.configure do
  flipper(:admin) { logged_in_user.admin? }
  flipper(:local) { request.env['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] == '127.0.0.1' }
end

Note that whatever methods or variables you use in your flipper blocks will need to be available to the scope in which you include Dolphin::Helper.

Add some features¶ ↑

Add config/dolphin/features.yml and configure some features. You need to provide the name of your feature, and the name of the flipper it should use.

local_feature: local
disabled_feature: off

Important: If you want to remember your feature settings between deploys, store features.yml somewhere that will survive them and link to it.

Include the helper¶ ↑

module ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  include Dolphin::Helper
end

module ApplicationHelper
  include Dolphin::Helper
end

Usage¶ ↑

Displaying a feature, or not¶ ↑

Use your super-secret mondo-feature with the feature helper method.

<% feature :local_feature do %>
  <h1>MMM, TUNA</h1>
<% end %>

Dolphin will call the flipper associated with the feature and run what’s in the feature block if the result is truthy. If a feature or a flipper isn’t found, or there’s an error with the flipper, whatever’s in the feature block won’t be run.

You can pass a partial to the feature helper instead of a block.

<%= feature(:local_feature, :partial => 'tuna', :collection => @tuna) %>

You can check the availability of a feature using feature?

<%= link_to('TUNA FISH', tuna_path) if feature?(:tuna) %>

Considerations¶ ↑

Dolphin stores it’s feature configuration on disk, and needs to read it once per request. This hasn’t been a performance issue for us, but it’s something to keep in mind.

License¶ ↑

Copyright © 2010 Matt Johnson, released under the MIT license