flipper VS Capistrano

That’s it! You now have a fully configured feature flagging system in your Rails app. Notice we didn’t cover some more advanced features that Flipper offers, including enabling features for a user group or individual users. For that, check out Flipper on Github. We also didn’t cover feature flagging frontend features in this post - if that becomes a requirement we could easily create an endpoint that uses the FeaturesRepo  and sends enabled features to the frontend to toggle. If you learned something new consider following me here - I’ll be putting out more content on Ruby on Rails and software development as I work on Firecode.io. Preparing for a coding interview? Check out Firecode.io.

I think you are calling it Runtime Controls: https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper/issues/162

Flipper is a gem that makes feature flags and different ways to toggle them available in Rails. It is highly modular. Apart from the main gem, you'll also have to pick a storage adapter — but more on that later. Let's use the ActiveRecord adapter for now.

Since Honeybadger is a Ruby shop, we use the flipper gem.

The next step came about when I learned more about our use of Flipper; a Ruby gem for dynamically toggling on and off features. I didn’t know when the feature would roll out, but I wanted control over the feature. I also wanted admins of other Forems to have control as well. This was trivial with Flipper. Once I deployed the code, Forem’s got the original behavior unless they turned “flipped” on the feature.

flipper with Flipper UI to enable flag management

What advantages does your gem have over Flipper?

If you don't want to go down the NFS share route then Capistrano is a useful tool if you're willing to write a little bit of ruby. It comes with some built in goodies like rollbacks. It's an oldie (pre-dockerize everything), but still useful.

https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

You can start by deploying from your machine to simultaneously get it deploying across all your servers, then I'd consider having a CI/CD pipeline take over and run Capistrano for you.

- Integrate automation deployment: [capistrano](https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano)

Integrate automation deployment: capistrano

The deployment process generally includes making the new version available, directing traffic from the old to the new version, and stopping the old versions. Capistrano has been doing this since 2006. However, what makes Kubernetes deployments better is the minimum number of pods required, and its rollout strategy minimizes or eliminates downtime. For example, a rolling update strategy can ensure new pods gradually replace old pods with configs like maxSurge and maxUnavailable. Because this is done in a declarative way, as a user or operator, you only need to ask Kubernetes to apply a given deployment and Kubernetes does the rest. Next up is the Kubernetes config map.

[1] https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano

Capistrano

What I had considered was writing a deployment script where upon successful build in a separate folder, it'd swap out the deployed folder, similar to how Capistrano works. It has a "current" folder and it'll build in a temporary folder and then replace the symlink to a newer build.

capistrano with plugins for deployment

deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP. It comes with "Zero Downtime Deployments" out of the box and can be extended by writing simple PHP code. (capistrano would be the equivalent in the Ruby world).

Capistrano, if you like Ruby.