Ask HN: Open-source feature flag service?

[masonicb00m]

Is there an open-source self-hosted feature flag service (like Launch Darkly, Gatekeeper, etc...)?

I’d rather run my own than have someone else do it, but if you’ve had good experiences with the SaaS options I’d be interested in hearing that too.

[sslalready]

https://github.com/Unleash/unleash

> Unleash is a feature toggle system, that gives you a great overview over all feature toggles across all your applications and services. It comes with official client implementations for Java, Node.js, Go, Ruby and Python.

[gshdg]

Why would you need a service to manage your feature flags?

[simplecomplex]

Ditto. One must already be using a database, so just add a table for features that you flip off and on.

How could that possibly be more work than integrating API calls to a third party service just to ascertain a few (mostly unchanging) values?

[masonicb00m]

When the major tech companies use a piece of infra, it’s likely they have a good reason. Here are some.

- not necessarily using/in control of db - audit log of who toggled which features and when - reporting on users exposed to each feature - A/B test support - toggle features without touching production database - ...

[pkaeding]

This page has some resources that should get you started: http://featureflags.io/resources/

There are lots of open-source feature flag options. Most are probably better thought of as 'libraries' than 'services', but they can definitely get you going with feature flags.

[mindcrash]

Here are two in microservice shape, ready-to-use and ready-to-deploy I am aware of:

https://github.com/checkr/flagr

https://github.com/markphelps/flipt

[remilouf]

I’ve had the same frustration recently and coded a working prototype in Elixir. I’d be happy to share.

[macca321]

https://bullet-train.io/ looks promising