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More information on how to use Flipt is noted in the Getting Started documentation.

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Flags

Flags are the basic unit in the Flipt ecosystem. Flags represent experiments or features that you want to be able to enable or disable for users of your applications.

For example, a flag named new-contact-page could be used to determine whether or not a given user sees the latest version of a contact us page that you are working on when they visit your homepage.

Flags can be used as simple on/off toggles or with variants and rules to support more elaborate use cases.

Flags Example

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Variants

Variants are options for flags. For example, if you have a flag colorscheme that determines which main colors your users see when they login to your application, then possible variants could include blue, green or red.

Variants can also have JSON attachments as of v1.6.1.

Variants Example

Variant keys must be unique for a given flag.

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Segments

Segments allow you to split your user base or audience up into predefined slices. This is a powerful feature that enables targeting groups to determine if a flag or variant applies to them.

An example segment could be new-users.

Segments Example

Segments are global across the Flipt application so they can be used in multiple rules.

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Match Types

When configuring a segment you can choose a Match Type of either:

  • Match All which requires ALL constraints to match for the segment to apply for evaluation.
  • Match Any which requires AT LEAST ONE constraint to match for the segment to apply for evaluation.

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Constraints

Constraints allow you to determine which segment a given entity is a part of.

For example, for a user to fall into the above new-users segment, you may want to check their finished_onboarding property.

Constraints Example

All constraints have a property, type, operator and optionally a value.

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Rules

Rules allow you to tie your flags, variants and segments together by specifying which segments are targeted by which variants.

Rules can be as simple as IF IN segment THEN RETURN variant_a or they can be richer by using distribution logic to roll out features on a percent basis.

Continuing our previous example, we may want to return the flag variant blue for all entities in the new-users segment. This would be configured like so:

Rules Example

Rules are evaluated in order per their rank from 1-N. The first rule that matches wins. Once created, rules can be re-ordered to change how they are evaluated.

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Distributions

Distributions allow you to roll out different variants of your flag to percentages of your user base based on your rules.

Let’s say that instead of always showing the blue variant to your new-users segment, you want to show blue to 30% of new-users, red to 10%, and green to the remaining 60%. You would accomplish this using rules with distributions:

Distributions Example

This is an extremely powerful feature of Flipt that can help you seamlessly deploy new features of your applications to your users while also limiting the reach of potential bugs.

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Evaluation

Evaluation is the process of sending requests to the Flipt server to process and determine if that request matches any of your segments and if so which variant to return.

In the above example involving colors, evaluation is where you send information about your current user to determine if they are a new-user, and which color (blue, red, or green) that they should see for their main color scheme.

Evaluation Example

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Entities

Evaluation works by uniquely identifying each thing that you want to compare against your segments and flags. We call this an entity in the Flipt ecosystem. More often than not this will be a user, but we didn’t want to make any assumptions about how your application works, which is why entity was chosen.

entity

what you want to test against in your application

For Flipt to successfully determine which bucket your entities fall into, it must have a way to uniquely identify them. This is the entityId and it is a simple string. It’s up to you what that entityId is.

It could be a:

  • email address
  • userID
  • IP address
  • physical address
  • etc

Anything that is unique enough for your application and its requirements.

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Context

The final piece of the puzzle is context. Context allows Flipt to determine which segment your entity falls into by comparing it to all of the possible constraints that you defined.

context

metadata associated with your entity used to determine which if any segments that entity is a member of

Examples of context could include:

  • isAdmin
  • favoriteColor
  • country
  • freeUser

Think of these as pieces of information that are usually not unique, but that can be used to split your entities into your segments.

You can include as much or as little context for each entity as you want, however, the more context that you provide, the more likely it is that an entity will match one of your segments.

In Flipt, context is a simple map of key-value pairs where the key is the property to match against all constraints, and the value is what is compared.