codingpaws / gitlab-feature
Use GitLab Feature Flags in your Laravel app
Requires
- guzzlehttp/guzzle: ^7.3
- illuminate/support: ^8.0 | ^9.0
Requires (Dev)
- mockery/mockery: ^1.4
- nunomaduro/phpinsights: ^2.0
- orchestra/testbench: ^7.6
- phpunit/phpunit: ^9.5
README
Use GitLab feature flags in your Laravel app.
Getting Started
- Set up feature flags in a project in your GitLab instance.
Install this library in your project.
composer require codingpaws/gitlab-feature
Publish the configuration
php artisan vendor:publish --provider=CodingPaws\\GitLabFeature\\FeatureServiceProvider
Go to your project’s feature flags and click on Configure
- Add entries to your
.env
configGITLAB_INSTANCE_ID
to the instance ID shown in the Configure modalGITLAB_API_URL
to the API url shown in the Configure modalGITLAB_ENV_NAME
to your environment name which you use in your feature flag rollout strategies.
Usage in PHP
When you want to check a feature flag in PHP, such as controllers or models, you can use the Feature
class:
use CodingPaws\GitLabFeature\Feature;
if (Feature::enabled('colored_shopping_cart')) {
echo '<div class="shopping-cart__colored" />';
}
if (Feature::disabled('date-format-24h')) {
$dateFormat = DATE_FORMAT_AMPM;
}
Usage in Blade
Importing in blade makes the views hard to read. In views you can use the provided helpers methods:
@if(feature_enabled('new_design'))
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/design-2021.css" />
@endif
@unless(feature_disabled('lazyload'))
<script src="/js/lazyload.min.js" defer async></script>
@endif
Feature flag cache
Feature flags are cached using the Laravel Cache
system.
This improves your site’s performance and reduces the load on your GitLab
instance. The cache duration can be configured in your
config/gitlab_feature.php
config file using the cache_duration
entry. The
standard environment variable is GITLAB_CACHE_DURATION
. By default, the cache
duration is set to 5 minutes.
You can manually clear the cache as well and force a reload of all feature
flags by using the refresh
method:
use CodingPaws\GitLabFeature\Feature;
Feature::refresh();
Custom User IDs
By default Auth::id()
is used to roll out feature flags based on a user’s ID.
You can register a custom User ID resolver if you want to roll out the flags
based on a different ID or the username:
use CodingPaws\GitLabFeature\UserIdResolver;
class MyIdResolver extends UserIdResolver
{
public function resolve(): int|string|null
{
return Auth::user()?->name;
}
}
UserIdResolver::register(new MyIdResolver);
Viewing all available feature flags
When debugging problems or working with A/B tests, it can be helpful to see the
state of all feature flags. To get a list of all feature flags and whether they
are enabled or not, use the all
method:
use CodingPaws\GitLabFeature\Feature;
$flags = Feature::all();
echo $flags['cool_feature'] ? 'enabled' : 'disabled';
How to mock feature flags
Mocking of feature flags can be done through Laravel facade mocking of
the Feature
facade:
use CodingPaws\GitLabFeature\Feature;
Feature::shouldReceive('enabled')
->with('cool_feature')
->once()
->andReturn(true);
Feature::enabled('cool_feature'); // returns `true`
SSL troubleshooting
On certain platforms or depending on your GitLab instance configuration—this does not apply to the GitLab.com SaaS platform—the in-built SSL verification can sometimes cause issues and not work. We’ve had problems in development environments on Windows, even though OpenSSL was installed.
For cases where SSL verification fails, you can disable it by setting the
gitlab_feature.disable_verification
to true
. By default, you can set the
GITLAB_DISABLE_VERIFICATION
environment variable to true
.