GitLab Speed Runs, 19 Aug 2020

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From YouTube: How to migrate legacy Feature Flags to the new version - Speed Run

Description

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213369

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Hi, my name is erica lewinsky and I'm the senior product manager for the progressive delivery group here at gitlab today, I want to talk to you about how to migrate legacy future flags into the new version of future flags.

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So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and walk you through the process so um feature flags are located under your project under operations, feature flags and if you already are using legacy feature flags, you may have noticed this new tooltip. That shows you on legacy flags that flag becomes read only soon and if you attempted to edit the flag you may have seen this note. That said, gitlab is moving to a new way of managing future flags and in 13.4, which is the next milestone.

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This feature flag will become read. Only please create a new feature flag. So the good news about the migration is that there's no need to change anything in the code. You just need to change the feature flag in gitlab, so you can do this through ui or through api. I'm going to demonstrate how to do it in ui, for this speed run.

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But everything that I'm showing you through the ui can also be done by api and and let's go ahead so.

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What we need to do is we need to create a new flag that basically is going to have the same name as the previous flag, and then everything is just going to work. So um let's go ahead and do that together. uh The the bad news is that you can't edit the legacy flags, so you can't um you know rename this to like demos underscore old and then just replace it easily. We're gonna have to do it in the next phases. We need to create a new flag uh with a new name.

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We need to delete the old uh flag and then create a new flag with the previous name. We can also, alternatively, alternatively, just delete the old flag and create a new flag under the new name.

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I don't recommend doing that, just so that you can make sure that all the metadata is the same as your old flag before deleting it. So that's what we're going to do. It's a little bit of a longer path, but I think it's a safer one. So let's go ahead and do that.

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So um I have this old flag called uh demo and what I want to do is I want to create a new flag, I'm going to call this demo underscore new and I'm going to try to copy all the metadata from the old flag to the new flag. So I have the name which I'm going to need to change after creating this flag, I'm going to create copy the description and then I'm going to copy the environment specs.

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So I have a rollout strategy for all environments for all users right so here I need to create a strategy, all users, all environments, and then I see that I also have for the testing environment percent rollout for logged in users. So let's go ahead and copy that.

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So I'm going to add a strategy, I'm going to add.

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Testing we can even copy paste.

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Some testing and this strategy is a percent rollout, so percent of users, and then I have here 50.

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Okay- um and I even have another strategy here- for specific user ids in.

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Testing right and then I'm going to copy those users here- and I have another strategy here for this flag, which is for production percent rule uh rollout, 50 percent and the same user. So let's go ahead and create that as well. I'm going to add another strategy.

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Which is percent of users, which was 15 and production, was my environment.

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And this one also had another strategy of on production.

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And user list and sorry user id and we had specific user ids okay, now I'm happy with my flag.

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And you can see that I have my demo new. It has all users for all environments, then I have percent usage users 50 on testing 15 on production. um The previous legacy didn't show me that this was also enabled for user id. So you can see we even have an enhancement uh here in the new feature flags, where you can also see the specific user's ids that are enabled, for course, for a specific environment. So we have four users and testing four users in production.

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So now that I'm happy with my new flag, I can also make sure that the toggle is the same state so that it is exactly the same. So at this moment this specific feature flag um is created, but it's not connected to the code, because the flag name doesn't match what is written in the code. So we're going to go ahead and delete our old feature, flag demo.

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It was deleted and now I'm going to go ahead and edit my new flag, so that it has the old name demo and that's it from this moment on it reflects what was configured in the code, and this is our new flag. There is no need again to change anything in the code, so now, if I turn it on, it will work. I turn it off. It will be disabled.

A

So I want to thank you for your time for watching this video today. I hope this helps. You understand the migration path for the new feature, flags um and I'll, see you next time um in our next speed run. Thank you.