Show HN: Flipt – an open-source feature flag solution | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Flipt – an open-source feature flag solution

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59 pointsbullcitydev16 comments

I'm amazed by how much you've achieved with this project! I thought it was 2 months worth of work until I looked at your blog, but even to have managed this in spare time over a couple of years is amazing.

The only thing I can think to suggest by way of improvement is some fairly prominent examples of the kinds of segmentation you can do with Flipt.

Do you see this being used for A/B testing as part of a pro version?

The documentation contains examples of a/b testing ( see variants)

Thank you! Yeah I rebased my git commits to clean things up and get rid of some silly mistakes.. although now I kind of wish I hadn't so the commit history told the full story.

I agree I need some better examples/documentation on how to do A/B/n segmentation. Will work on that ASAP.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Wow! I was just working on something very similar, (go+riotjs) after frustration with LaunchDarkly. Encourage you to offer paid SaaS

Thanks! I have heard the feedback from others as well. I think that will be the next thing I do with Flipt, as well as support more traditional RDBMS'.

May I ask what specifically you found frustration with LaunchDarkly?

The one I was working on used PG for storage, redis for caching.

I paid for some tier, didn't like off-prem, v1 didn't have vairant (was bool only), upgrade to v2 was bumpy, their php-client did some odd stuff (background shell_exec) the support didn't even know about.

CEO was nice enough, refunded some of my money.

A SaaS would not live within enterprise firewalls and might therefor be a no-no for many companies.

Looks nice, very easy to setup/run and the documentation is clean and detailed. Tweek (https://git.io/tweek), our own open source feature manager shares many of the concepts and architecture.

The solution seems very polished! Nice work!

-- offtopic: I'm working on something similar as well, but Toggles/Feature flags is "one of the parts" of the solution ( it's more a full blown development tool for handling settings, centralized services (eg. e-mail) and much more -> Eg. a support tool with forms which can be prepared by devs)

It's currently only dotnet ( and MVC) based though, but it's working.

I like the service. I've seen that you are going to ofer paid version. How are you going to keep two repositories (open source and pro) in sync?

That is a very good question and something I have been struggling with. Do you have any ideas?

I know that it has been done (ex: Sidekiq has OSS, Pro and Enterprise versions).

My thought was to maintain a private fork for the pro version and continuously merge in changes from the OSS version, as well as add back any features into the OSS version that could be beneficial to everyone from the pro version.

But this does sound messy.. would love to know how others have done this in the past.

Not sure how well that'd work in your situation, but maybe you could license the pro parts with one of the licensezero ( https://licensezero.com ) licenses. That would disallow use of your software (or the parts of it you choose) with either closed source software, or in a commercial setting (depending on the license you pick).

It would mean more work spelling all that out to your users, but you would make up for it by not having to hide/separate code as much. You'd have to be comfortable with 'showing all your code though.

Interesting.. I've never heard of licensezero. Will check it out this weekend. Thanks for the tip!

We also recently open sourced our internal feature flag tool Bullet Train: https://github.com/SolidStateGroup/bullet-train-api

Would welcome any feedback.

This looks awesome. Thank you, great work.

Thank you!

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