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kyverno/docs/dev/feature-flags/README.md
Mariam Fahmy 8f4ddeecab
doc: add feature flag guidelines (#7951)
Signed-off-by: Mariam Fahmy <mariam.fahmy@nirmata.com>
2023-08-02 10:55:36 +00:00

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# Feature Flags Guidelines
## Introduction
Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, are a software development technique that allows developers to turn features on and off in a production environment without requiring a new deployment.
There are several ways to enable/disable features in Golang:
1. Feature Toggles: It provides a simple way to enable/disable features based on environment variables and/or command line arguments
2. Container arguments
## Feature Flags
The `toggle` package exists in pkg/toggle can be used to define and manage a feature toggle for a new feature in Kyverno. Lets say we need to introduce a new feature toggle to enable/disable deferred loading. We can do it as follows:
1. Define a flag name, description, environment variable and a default value for this new feature in the `toggle` package:
```
EnableDeferredLoadingFlagName = "enableDeferredLoading"
EnableDeferredLoadingDescription = "enable deferred loading of context variables"
enableDeferredLoadingEnvVar = "FLAG_ENABLE_DEFERRED_LOADING"
defaultEnableDeferredLoading = true
```
2. Create a new toggle for the new feature using the `newToggle` method which takes both default value and environment variable as arguments:
```
EnableDeferredLoading = newToggle(defaultEnableDeferredLoading, enableDeferredLoadingEnvVar)
```
At this point, we have an instance of `toggle` which will be used later to call `toggle.enabled()` of the feature toggle to execute code conditionally.
3. Add a new method `EnableDeferredLoading() bool` in `Toggles` Interface at pkg/toggle/context.go to call the `enabled` method. It will be used later in Kyverno controllers:
```
type Toggles interface {
EnableDeferredLoading() bool
}
func (defaultToggles) EnableDeferredLoading() bool {
return EnableDeferredLoading.enabled()
}
```
4. In the controller, we can use it as follows:
```
flag.Func(toggle.EnableDeferredLoadingFlagName, toggle.EnableDeferredLoadingDescription, toggle.EnableDeferredLoading.Parse)
```
### Advantages
1. Feature toggles can be accessed globally. Its value can be checked anywhere in the code, no need to pass it as an argument among methods/functions.
2. Users can either enable/disable the feature by setting it as an argument to the container `--enableDeferredLoading=false` or setting its
environment variable `FLAG_ENABLE_DEFERRED_LOADING=0`
## Container Arguments
Container arguments can be used directly in the controller. Lets say we want to add a new container flag `--enable-feature`, we can do it as follows:
1. Create a variable for this new flag:
```
var(
enableFeature bool
)
```
2. Define a bool flag with specified name, default value, and usage:
```
flagset.BoolVar(&enableFeature, "enable-feature", true, "Set this flag to 'false' to ....")
```