Laika

Laika is a feature flag/feature toggle service, written in Go, that allows the creation of flags and their activation/deactivation for specific environments. This way it is possible to control in which environments each feature is available. For instance, when a new feature is developed and released, it would make sense if it was only made available, at first, in a testing or Q&A environment, and only later in production. With Laika this can be achieved by simply going to a web page, selecting the feature, and changing its status on the desired environments.

Using Laika in a project thus allows for fast and continuous feature release and deployment.

laika-php is a PHP library that handles communication with Laika's API. You can get it here.

laika-react is a React JS module that handles communication with Laika's API. You can get it here.

API Reference

Laika uses CQRS, the query endpoints are as follows.

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/api/health	Check the service health
GET	/api/features	List all features
GET	/api/features/:name	Get a feature by name
GET	/api/features/:name/status/:env	Get the status of a feature
		in a particular environment
GET	/api/environments	List all environments

The command endpoint is for manipulating data.

Method	Endpoint	Example body	Description
POST	/api/events/environment_created	{"name":"staging"}	Create a new environment.
POST	/api/events/feature_created	{"name":"feature1"}	Create a new feature.
POST	/api/events/user_created	{"username":"admin","password":"secret"}	Create a new user.
POST	/api/events/feature_toggled	{"feature":"feature1","environment":"staging","status":true}	Toggle a feature.
POST	/api/events/feature_deleted	{"name":"feature1"}	Delete a feature.
POST	/api/events/environments_ordered	{"order":["dev","staging"]}	Change env display order.
POST	/api/events/environment_deleted	{"name":"staging"}	Delete an environment.

Client

Laika contains a polling HTTP client that allows to easily check for enabled/disabled features on Go code. It can be found in the client package.

Install

$ go get -u github.com/MEDIGO/laika/client

Usage

package main

import (
	"log"

	"github.com/MEDIGO/laika/client"
)

func main() {
	c, err := client.NewClient(client.Config{
		Addr:        "127.0.0.1:8000",
		Username:    "my-username",
		Password:    "my-password",
		Environment: "prod",
	})

	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	if c.IsEnabled("my-awesome-feature", false) {
		log.Print("IT'S ALIVE!")
	} else {
		log.Print("Move along. Nothing to see here.")
	}
}

Developing

To develop Laika you need to have the following tools installed in your machine:

• Docker Compose

Build and start the docker contaniers and continuously run/build the server and UI with:

$ make develop

And start hacking!

$ open http://localhost:8000

Testing

The whole test suite can be executed with:

$ make test

The docker setup starts with a mysql database. If you would like to connect to your own database, you can pass the configuration to them with the following environment variables:

LAIKA_TEST_MYSQL_HOST=db
LAIKA_TEST_MYSQL_PORT=3306
LAIKA_TEST_MYSQL_USERNAME=root
LAIKA_TEST_MYSQL_PASSWORD=root
LAIKA_TEST_MYSQL_DBNAME=laika

Current state of the project

In the current release of Laika, it is possible to create feature flags and enable/disable them in the existing environments.

Wishlist

• Specify country access (e.g. feature only enabled in Germany).
• Specify user access with percentage (e.g. feature only enabled for 30% of the user base).
• Have a field for environment creation on the web page.
• History for flag status changes.

Copyright and license

Copyright © 2019 MEDIGO GmbH.

Laika is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for the full license text.