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Laravel Unleash client

August 2019

2 minutes

Although I don't get paid to write PHP anymore (my full-time job is full-stack JavaScript/Node), I still like to dabble with Laravel as it's "batteries included" approach makes it really easy to knock together a concept in a matter of hours.

Something we've been rolling out at work at the moment is the integration of Unleash into some of our projects. If you are unfamiliar with Unleash, it's an open-source feature toggle package which aims to be trivial to deploy, yet fully featured with a plethora of strategies to choose from - you can even make your own.

If you are unfamiliar with feature toggles/flags (spoiler: they are awesome), I'd suggest reading up on them otherwise this package will not really make that much sense! A TL;DR on feature toggles/flags:

Hiding features in your codebase behind toggles that are controlled externally.

Some of the benefits of this are:

  • You can experiment with rolling these features out, great for measuring the impact of a particular feature.
  • Non-technical people can choose when to roll out new features, for instance to coincide with a marketing push, taking the burden away from the developer.
  • You can test things in production without having to worry about degrading the experience for actual users.

Doing a bit of searching on Packagist, there didn't seem to be anything that was compatible with Laravel which I thought was a bit of a shame as Laravel's Blade syntax would lend itself perfectly to working with feature toggles.

So here's my attempt at an Unleash client:

https://github.com/mikefrancis/laravel-unleash

It's still very much a work in progress as I am still building strategies to handle all the default Unleash strategies.

If anyone would like to give it a whirl, I'm looking for testers at the moment to see how stable it and if any performance improvements can be made.

Happy feature toggling!

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