Introduction to Launch Darkly and feature flags

Overview of Launchdarkly

LaunchDarkly is a popular tool for feature flagging, wrapping software features in a flag and then controlling their rollout in a safe and controlled way. It allows for the deployment of new features quickly, minimising the risk of releasing poor quality software, and making roll outs much simpler to manage.

This article will provide an overview of LaunchDarkly and how to use feature flags with Bitbucket pipelines.

What is Launchdarkly?

Launch Darkly is an enterprise-grade feature delivery platform enabling software developers to test, monitor, deploy and control features without requiring code changes. With Launchdarkly powerful feature release capabilities, teams can safely ship sensitive and complex features while reducing the risk of complex rollouts. In addition, feature flags can be used to toggle the launch of specific product features on and off in real time as needed.

This allows product teams to rapidly test new features with different user segments, environments or third parties rather than waiting for major releases. Feature flags also enable organisations to quickly identify errors or bugs and quickly react and mitigate risk before stakeholders are affected. Additionally, Launch Darkly provides granular control access on which users should see a feature based on their attributes such as segmentation criteria like user ID, geographic location or device type.

Additionally, Launch Darkly offers strong auditing capabilities such as automatic notifications when changes are made in environments, real-time monitoring of each environment and detailed reports on the performance of experimental experiments or rollouts. This helps organisations maintain security while offering full transparency into releasing new features into production.

Benefits of using Launchdarkly

LaunchDarkly is a feature flagging system designed to help software teams create and deploy high performing, reliable, and secure applications faster. Through LaunchDarkly, teams can manage user experiences and streamline processes using feature flagging. Feature flags are modularized code fragments created to bridge the gap between different states in a software development lifecycle, allowing teams to move faster while keeping their users safe.

Using LaunchDarkly offers several key benefits to software teams:

• Improved Deployment Speed – By utilising feature flags instead of traditional deployment methods, teams can move quickly and accurately in their deployment processes. With Launchdarkly automation features, teams can deploy features much faster than with manual methods.
• Safe Exploration & Experimentation – Because feature flags are easy to switch off if they don’t perform as expected or introduce new bugs or errors into an application, team members can feel confident exploring new options without worrying about breaking things or introducing security risks.
• Targeted Release & Rollouts – Feature flags allow for targeted releases that allow software teams to customise the experience for any subset of users. This allows for experimentation on different user segments without needing full version cycles or deployment pipelines each time something needs a change.
• Uninterrupted User Experiences – With feature flagging systems like Launch Darkly, there is no need for downtime or disruption when deploying updates — as soon as the new code is approved it’s live! This allows for greater user satisfaction and improved speed of development and delivery cycles.

Setting up LaunchDarkly

Setting up LaunchDarkly is a great way to instantly test and deploy new features in your software.

Feature flags, such as those provided by Launch Darkly, are an incredibly useful tool that can help you increase your product’s reliability and speed up development.

This article will explore how you can use Launchdarkly with Bitbucket pipelines for streamlined feature flag management.

Create a LaunchDarkly account

Creating an account with LaunchDarkly is necessary to use all of the features and functionality of the feature flagging platform. However, it only takes a few minutes and can be done from the LaunchDarkly website or your app’s dashboard.

To set up your account, you must provide your name, business email address, and a password. You will also need to enter basic information about your organisation such as the name, type, size, and country of operation. After completing this, you can set up environments for development teams in seconds. With App Groups enabled for each team, you can control access according to permissions across different systems and environments. This makes feature flagging easy to manage when scaling quickly or deploying complex applications.

You will also be required to create a default role upon signing up that has full privileges over all system settings and also sets specific permissions on who can access what on your project:

• Admin – A user with full administrator privileges able to control all aspects of feature flags within the project
• Developer – A user who can change flags while they are working; they are unable to apply changes globally
• Quality Assurance – A user who enables inspecting flags without making any changes
• Viewer – A user who will only have read-only access

Once these roles are set-up, you can begin creating feature flags that enable you to launch features faster and more confidently!

Create a project in LaunchDarkly

When starting with LaunchDarkly, the first step is creating a project. This can be done quickly and easily in the Dashboard. A project will allow you to define feature flags and environments, organise your team members and set up integrations with other services.

After signing in to the LaunchDarkly Dashboard, click on the Projects tab and “Create a Project”. Next, enter a project name that describes what you’ll be using it for, such as the application name or product you are feature flagging for.

Next, create an environment that describes where user requests originate—for example production or staging. Then, define your users by assigning them roles – such as Product Managers or Developers – so you can segment which team member should access what feature flags within a particular environment in LaunchDarkly. If needed, add additional environments if requests are coming from different sources in the future.

You may also want to add third-party integrations by connecting third-party services such as Intercom or Segment so that user data is sent directly from these integration partners into either Full Stack or Enterprise screens within Launchdarkly dashboard; these data points can help inform your decisions when creating feature flags. Once complete, save and launch your project! You’re ready to start creating feature flags and rolling out new features in minutes with Launchdarkly!

Add feature flags in LaunchDarkly

Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, are a valuable tool enabling teams to adopt an agile approach to introducing features into the production environment. To start with LaunchDarkly, you must first sign up and create an account. Once logged in, you can set-up a new project and start creating feature flags.

For each flag, you will set a ‘default’ value (which could be true for some users or false for others). Then you can use rulesets or user segments to determine who sees what variation of your flag. Examples of user segments include internal employee groups or specific geographical locations, while rulesets could be based on date ranges or request URLs. By dynamically managing user segments and rulesets within Launch Darkly, the team can quickly and easily deploy code segmented by their criteria.

To ensure that the feature flags work as expected everywhere – during development and testing phases as well as during releases – it is recommended that they should be added throughout your application’s codebase. This includes adding conditional instructions around every feature related to your application’s functionality so they can be evaluated before they are available to render in the user interface. Launch Darkly provides extensive documentation providing step-by-step instructions on how feature flags should be added throughout different code types associated with their platform integrations.

Addition of feature flagging capability allows teams to speed up time-to-market while increasing security by deploying features gradually instead of releasing them all at once – ultimately enabling controlled access and rapid iteration across multiple environments such as development and production simultaneously without sacrificing quality or performance of delivered software.

Integrating LaunchDarkly with Bitbucket Pipelines

Launch Darkly is a feature flagging and management platform that allows for quick and safe experimentation. Feature flags can help you gradually roll out features in a controlled way so that you can track the success of your experiment.

Bitbucket pipelines is a CI/CD tool that enables continuous delivery of your software. This section will discuss how you can integrate Launchdarkly with Bitbucket pipelines.

Create a Bitbucket pipeline

LaunchDarkly and BitBucket Pipelines integration can help you automate your feature flag deployments. To begin, you need to create a BitBucket pipeline in which you will set up your LaunchDarkly environment variables.

To get started, open the repository page in Bitbucket and go to Pipelines (under “Pipelines” in the left-hand menu). Then click “Create Pipeline,” which will open your newly created pipeline’s “Settings” page. This page has many settings you can configure; however, we need to add a few variables to connect LaunchDarkly with our pipeline.

In the left-hand side of the Settings page, click on “Variables” and use these fields to add two environment variables: – one for your LaunchDarkly account access token (LD_ACCESS_TOKEN) – one for your active project key (LD_ENVIRONMENT).

These field values are in the upper right of all feature flag pages within LaunchDarkly, under “Project Settings”. Once those values have been added to the pipeline view they will be passed into all tasks in this build as environment variables like normally when using any other language or system. These two pieces of information will allow us to securely access our feature flags when running tasks on our pipelines from within any language or system such as Gradle or Maven.

Configure the pipeline with LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag management platform that can help you minimise any potential harm to the stability of your production environment while making changes to software and app releases.

To use Launchdarkly with Bitbucket Pipelines, you must set up your environment, configure and run the pipeline, and evaluate your results.

Set up environment variables in Bitbucket

Integrating Launch Darkly and Bitbucket Pipelines requires setting up environment variables in Bitbucket. These environment variables provide pipeline builds with the configuration settings necessary for integration.

First, you must generate an API access token in the LaunchDarkly Admin Console. Then, add it to a Bitbucket secret variable. Once complete, you can configure an environment variable in your Bitbucket repository with your API access token key name and value. This will allow your pipelines to build scripts to read and access the API key to securely connect with LaunchDarkly.

Finally, include the environment variable parameter at runtime when pipelines executes a pipeline build script so that it has permission to connect your application or service with LaunchDarkly. This will create a secure connection, allowing each system to communicate and share data as needed. After completing all of these steps, you are now ready to take advantage of the powerful automation capabilities available by integrating LaunchDarkly and Bitbucket Pipelines!

Using LaunchDarkly feature flags with Bitbucket pipelines

LaunchDarkly is a feature flagging system that can help you manage and deploy features quickly and easily. It enables developers to set up flags associated with certain features in their application, then control which users see the flag.

This article will explain how to use Launchdarkly with Bitbucket pipelines to deploy features quickly and efficiently.

Activate feature flags in production

Activating feature flags in production involves enabling them across your application’s environments and monitoring their performance. To ensure safe and successful deployment, it is important to use a feature flagging service such as Launch Darkly.

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that allows teams to easily create and control feature flags, improving the safety and speed of their deployments. Feature flags can be used for targeted rollouts, A/B testing, progressive delivery, blueprinting and more—all from Launchdarkly comprehensive dashboard. The platform also offers powerful integrations with leading CI/CD platforms for streamlined deployment automation.

When activating a feature flag in production, it is important to follow best practices. This includes ensuring that the flag is visible across all environments where it may need to be used; utilising Launch Darkly’s integrated rollouts which allow for gradual release; taking advantage of Launchdarkly alerting options for monitoring deployments; and tracking user segmentation with Targeting & segmentation features to assess the flag’s effectiveness. Additionally, using flagged experiments can help determine whether or not a feature should go to production by allowing teams to gauge its impact over time without disrupting their users’ experience.

By following these steps when activating features flags in production with LaunchDarkly, teams can increase their deployments’ safety and efficiency while ensuring they have full control over the features they are offering their users.

Deactivate feature flags in production

Deactivating feature flags in production is the process of removing a feature from being available to actual users. This could involve completely blocking users’ access to the feature, or disabling it for all users but a select few. This procedure is typically done when user testing and experimentation feedback indicates that a feature should be removed or changed to improve the user experience.

When deactivating a feature flag in production, it is important to thoroughly test the environment beforehand and ensure all system aspects are functioning properly without the flag being active. Generally speaking, organisations should use caution when deactivating feature flags as they can cause unexpected behaviour in production environments if not done correctly.

LaunchDarkly simplifies rapid rollouts and rollbacks, allowing your organisation’s engineering team to quickly toggle features on and off with minimal disruption. This allows organisations to manage their development cycles more effectively, ensuring new features work as expected before committing them for full-scale release. Furthermore, Launchdarkly can give users control over how much of their data will be affected by temporary changes during experimentation, providing additional safety measures for critical operations.

Monitor feature flags in production

Once a feature flag is deployed to production, you must carefully monitor its progress. Different types of monitoring are dependent on the stages of the feature flag. For example, you should monitor for effectiveness and stability when a feature flag is in its development or QA phases. However, once the feature is deployed to production, you must carefully monitor customer feedback and watch for any unexpected errors or changes that could affect user engagement.

Launch Darkly enables teams to track real-time customer usage of their feature flags. With Launchdarkly feature flag analytics tool, teams can monitor customer behaviour when interacting with a certain feature and quickly identify trends that could indicate success or failure.

With this granular information, teams can quickly take action to ensure that their customers are having the best experience possible while using their product or service – ensuring their features are always optimised for success. In addition, monitoring customer behaviour throughout each stage of the product life cycle gives teams insights into how those features are utilised and if modifications need to be made. This allows teams added agility when making improvements or initiating new features so that users can always be taken care of with minimal effort from the team.

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