Flipper Rails Demo

This is an example Rails application that serves as a working demo to walk you through the basics of using Flipper. You can run the demo and interact with the feature toggles, or you can browser the source code to see the commands for toggling features.

Automated Setup (Fast and Easy)

Once you've pulled down the repo, you should be able to run bin/setup, and the application will bootstrap everything for you.

$ bin/setup

This demo already has the pre-requisites setup and ready to go. You only need to add the FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN.

Manual Setup (See how it all works!)

Copy over the sample .env file

$ cp .env.example .env

Get your FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN by going to your project's "Tokens" page. (Create a test project for the demo if you'd_prefer.) You can use the existing token or create a new one and then copy the value into your .env file.

Once your .env is set up with the FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN from your account, you can start up the application:

bundle install
bin/rails db:prepare
bin/rails server

Then, once the server is running, you can toggle the feature via command-line with the instructions shown on the home page.

Adding Flipper to an Existing Rails App

Step by step instructions for using Flipper with Rails.

Step 1

Add flipper-cloud to the Gemfile.

flipper_version = '~> 0.25.0'
gem 'flipper-cloud', flipper_version
gem 'flipper-active_record', flipper_version

Run bundle to install.
Run bin/rails g flipper:active_record to generate migration for ActiveRecord adapter.
Run bin/rails db:migrate to run migration for ActiveRecord adapter.

Step 2

Create an account on flippercloud.io and get the token provided during signup.

Step 3

Configure cloud using ENV vars (preferred):

# required
FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN=<your environment token here>

# optional (for production environment so you never poll cloud)
FLIPPER_CLOUD_SYNC_SECRET=<webhook sync secret>

Step 4

Test that everything works from console:

FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN=<token-goes-here> bin/rails console

irb(main):006:0> Flipper.enabled?(:foo)
=> false
irb(main):007:0> Flipper.enable(:foo)
=> true
irb(main):008:0> Flipper.enabled?(:foo)
=> true

Or test that it works using this demo application:

git clone https://github.com/fewerandfaster/flipper-rails-demo.git
cd flipper-rails-demo
FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN=<token-from-step-2-goes-here> bin/rails server

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

Dotenv

This app also ships with dotenv so if you cp .env.example .env and tweak the token in .env, you won't need to export the FLIPPER_CLOUD_TOKEN env var for the Rails server or console.

More?

Head on over to the Flipper Cloud documentation.

Or check out the flipper README for links to more documentation and examples on the types of enablements and how to instrument and optimize your usage of Flipper.