fickle

Don't make up your mind.

Fickle is a feature engine for Rails 3. It is currently under heavy development and is not stable in any sense of the word. Especially not the emotional sense.

Unlike other solutions, fickle lets you manage your features without opening a file, committing to a repository, performing a deploy, or breaking out ssh. Just point a browser at your application and bend it to your will!

Not only that, but fickle allows you to override your global features by mixing feature-set functionality into any model in your application. If you want to restrict some experimental features to a group of beta testers, it's easy to implement. If you want to enable every feature when you're logged in as, say, "guinea_pig," you got it.

Quickstart

1. Add fickle to your Gemfile

   gem 'fickle'
   

2. Run the generator

   ./script/rails generate fickle:install

3. Add feature switches

   <%- if feature_enabled? :my_totally_sweet_feature %>
     <!--
       My totally sweet code
     -->
   <%- else %>
     <!--
       My slightly less sweet code
     -->
   <%- end %>
   

4. Administer!

   

Web Interface

Fickle includes a web interface for managing your features. You can globally turn features on and off, and you can manage them on a model-by-model basis. You can even hardstop a feature if it starts causing you trouble.

The fickle:install generator adds this line to your config/routes.rb file:

fickle_admin 'features'

You can change this line for more advanced control, or you can remove it altogether if you don't want to use the web interface.

The following options are currently supported:

path         - the first argument, where the fickle admin panel should live.
:restrict_on - symbol which refers to a method in ApplicationController for
               access restriction (ex. :current_user). If provided, fickle
               will return a 404 unless the result of this method call returns
               true for "can_administer_fickle?"
:controller  - The controller to use. If you would like to override fickle's
               behavior, you can subclass "Fickle::FeaturesController" with
               your own controller and provide the name here.

Advanced Features

Let's say you want to limit features on a per-user basis.

app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  
  has_feature_set
  
end

app/controllers/experimental_controller.rb

class ExperimentalController

  before_filter :authenticate
  
  def secret_feature
    status 404 and return unless current_user.has_feature? :my_secret_new_feature
    # Do secret stuff
  end

end

You can also access this method in the views. Cause, you know, it's on the model.

Tips/tricks

Want a user who gets all the goodies? It's ruby!

app/models/user.rb

def has_feature?(feature)
  admin? || super
end

Oh, snap that was easy.

Copyright (c) 2011 chrisrhoden && lazerclub industries

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