Flipper Documentation

What is this?

Flipper is an open source library that provides simple, beautiful and performant feature flags for Ruby. Flipper Cloud is a platform built on Flipper that makes it easy to...

• Manage all your projects in one place. Rather than having feature flags setup in separate or unique ways for each application or micro-service, we can centralize feature flag control, access and auditing for your entire organization.
• Give non-technical staff the power to release code. Engineers setup the conditionals in the code, but anyone can enable or disable them using targeting as wide as a group or % of users to as narrow as a single user or random moment in time.
• Get code into production faster. Once a feature flag is in place and protecting your new code, you can ship the new code to production and avoid long lived version control branches (and the hassle that comes with keeping them up to date and merging/deploying them safely).
• Safely isolate new and existing code. Turning off a feature flag is always faster than a rollback. Similarly, sometimes you just want to turn something non-critical off and go back to bed. We make it a single button click (and include an audit log of every change).
• Slowly rollout new features. By enabling a feature for a small percentage of users and slowly increasing, you can gain confidence in a new application feature and avoid a thundering herd of users eager to check it out.

How does it work?

We have a beautiful web interface for managing your organizations, projects, environments and features. Additionally, we expose a simple HTTP API along with a client library that takes only a few minutes to integrate into your application.

When you create a project, it comes preloaded with a production environment and a personal environment for each developer to get you up and running quickly. But we support as many other environments as necessary (e.g. staging, smoke, Heroku review app, or whatever you can dream up).

Just show me the code! Ok, here is a quick example:

Basic Setup

# FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN=<your-token-here>
require "flipper"

if Flipper.enabled?(:billing)
  # get paid
else
  # wish you were getting paid
end

For more details and best practices, read the getting started guide below or check out our Flipper Cloud rails demo app.

Who are we?

Flipper Cloud is built with a lot of ❤️ in South Bend, Indiana by Fewer & Faster — owned by John Nunemaker, Steve Smith & Brandon Keepers.

Steve leans toward the form (design) and John toward the function (code). Brandon is smack dab in the middle -- great at both. You could say our combined skill sets make the perfect sandwich.

We owned a company together a decade ago where we were consultants and built a few products. In 2011, we were acquired by GitHub. We worked there for many years — while it grew from 50 to thousands of employees.

While at GitHub we maintained their open source setup of Flipper (among many other things), which served billions of feature checks a day (and was one of the most stable pieces of infrastructure).

Seeing how Flipper changed the way GitHub released software was neat. Why not re-build it so everyone can partake? Thus Flipper Cloud was born.

In 2018, we created a new company (Fewer & Faster) to build Flipper Cloud.