LaunchDarkly nodejs utils

LaunchDarkly (https://launchdarkly.com/) provides SaaS based Feature Flag management at scale, with SDKs for all major languages.

This unofficial module provides NodeJs functions wrapping the LaunchDarkly API. This is not the sdk for implementing flags in your app - it is the api to manage your account/flags.

Why?

We need a way to manage flags as part of CI/CD pipelines, and there is not another project currently providing a simple interface to manage flags and other objects in LaunchDarkly via API in nodejs.

How?

There is a swagger.yaml available to generate bindings (https://launchdarkly.github.io/ld-openapi/swagger.yaml), so we use the swagger-js module to generate a client (https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-js), and add some extra features around logging, error handling, and chaining of operations. In addition we expose apis as a commandline tool.

Install

1. npm install launchdarkly-nodeutils --save or clone this repo.
2. Generate an access token with the permissions for the operations you will use. Please read: https://docs.launchdarkly.com/v2.0/docs/api-access-tokens

Use cases

The command line tool or nodejs module can be used for many things. Here are some examples.

Automated management of ACLs

Users of Enterprise LaunchDarkly can create Custom Roles for fine-grained RBAC. These can be maintained in git, and applied to LaunchDarkly when changes are committed via bulkUpsertCustomRoles or bulkUpsertCustomRoleFolder.

Setting flag state for automated tests

Automated test suites can call the apis to toggle features and set targetting rules before test executions. With care, a matrix of flag based test scenarios could defined and executed.

Releasing flags in bulk

A typical release workflow to move a set of flag attributes from test to prod may consist of CI jobs calling ldutils to:

1. create a backup of flags to be migrated using getFeatureFlags my-proj > ./backup.json
2. use bulkMigrateFeatureFlags my-proj flag-x,flag-y test prod to copy flag attrs from test to prod
3. if issues, to rollback the flags use restoreFeatureFlags my-proj flag-x,flag-y prod ./backup.json

Scheduled backup of flags

A cron/ci job could call getFeatureFlags for each project, and commit the json to private git repo in order to keep a versioned record of change. This could also be used to recover environment state.

Refreshing Environments

Copying flag attributes from prod back to preprod for testing. Also newly created environments can be primed with flag targetting rules using bulkMigrateFeatureFlags.

Command line usage

After cloning this repo you can make ldutils executable, and use it to make api calls based on passed in parameters.

please read the API documentation for examples.

chmod 755 ./ldutils
./ldutils

The above will display a help screen of instructions, thanks to https://github.com/tj/commander.js/

Optionally you can add ldutils to your PATH:

# cloned repo
sudo ln -s /<clonepath>/launchdarkly-nodeutils/ldutils /usr/local/bin/ldutils

# or after 'npm install launchdarkly-nodeutils --save'
sudo ln -s /<installpath>/node_modules/launchdarkly-nodeutils/ldutils /usr/local/bin/ldutils

Make sure you have env var LAUNCHDARKLY_API_TOKEN set, and if piping output to another command, ensure that LAUNCHDARKLY_API_LOGLEVEL is not set to 'debug' to ensure only the json result of the command is returned.

Here are some examples of commandline usage (if you have not added ldutils to PATH, prefix with ./:

export LAUNCHDARKLY_API_TOKEN=<api-token>

// collect all flags for a project
ldutils getFeatureFlags <myProjectId>

// update or create a customRole with array of policies
ldutils upsertCustomRole <customRoleKey> <customRoleName> '[{"resources":["proj/*"],"actions":["*"],"effect":"allow"}]'

proxies

If you are executing ldutils via a proxy, just set the https_proxy env var, eg:

export https_proxy=http://localhost:3128

commandline modes and parameters

The command line modes and parameters map directly to the functions exposed for use in nodejs apps. Each call to ldutils takes a 'mode', and associated parameters as below:

ldutils <mode> [parameter values space separated]

The following modes are supported. This info is also available via: ldutils -help

Feature flags

Mode	parameters
getFeatureFlags	projectKey
getFeatureFlag	projectKey, featureFlagKey, environmentKeyQuery
getFeatureFlagState	projectKey, featureFlagKey, environmentKeyQuery
updateFeatureFlag	projectKey, featureFlagKey, patchComment
toggleFeatureFlag	projectKey, featureFlagKey, environmentKeyQuery, enabled
migrateFeatureFlag	projectKey, featureFlagKey, fromEnv, toEnv, includeState
bulkMigrateFeatureFlags	projectKey, featureFlagKeys, fromEnv, toEnv, includeState
restoreFeatureFlags	projectKey, featureFlagKeys, targetEnv, backupJsonFile, includeState

• migrateFeatureFlag mode is used to copy flag attributes between environments. This covers: targets, rules, fallthrough, offVariation, prerequisites and optionally the flag on/off state. eg. to migrate a flag from dev to test env.

ldutils migrateFeatureFlag my-project my-flag dev test

use bulkMigrateFeatureFlagswith a comma separated list of flags ids to migrations multiple flags in one operation.

Custom roles

Custom role functionality requires an Enterprise LaunchDarkly account.

Mode	parameters
getCustomRoles	none
getCustomRole	customRoleKey
getCustomRoleById	customRoleId
createCustomRole	customRoleKey, customRoleName, customRolePolicyArray, customRoleDescription(optional)
updateCustomRole	customRoleKey, customRoleName, customRolePolicyArray, customRoleDescription(optional)
upsertCustomRole	customRoleKey, customRoleName, customRolePolicyArray, customRoleDescription(optional)
bulkUpsertCustomRoles	roleBulkLoadFile
bulkUpsertCustomRoleFolder	roleFolder

• bulkUpsertCustomRoles mode iterates over a json file containing an array of role json and either creates or updates each. Promises are resolved sequentially to avoid rate limiting.
• bulkUpsertCustomRoleFolder mode does the same on a folder of json files.

ldutils bulkUpsertCustomRoles ./exampleRoleBulkLoad.json
ldutils bulkUpsertCustomRoleFolder ./companyRoles

For details on role policy object structures, please see: https://docs.launchdarkly.com/docs/custom-roles

Team members

Mode	parameters
getTeamMembers	none
getTeamMember	memberId
getTeamMemberByEmail	emailAddress
getTeamMemberCustomRoles	emailAddress
inviteTeamMember	emailAddress, initialRole

./ldutils inviteTeamMember [email protected] reader

node app usage

Assumes that you have set the LAUNCHDARKLY_API_TOKEN environment var.

let ldUtils = await new LaunchDarklyUtils().create(process.env.LAUNCHDARKLY_API_TOKEN);

// get flag state
let flagEnabled = await ldUtils.getFeatureFlagState('myProject', 'feature-abc', 'dev');

// update flag state to on=true
await ldUtils.toggleFeatureFlag('myProject', 'feature-def', 'dev', true);

please read the API documentation for further details.

Contributing

Here is a summary. For more detail see Contributing.

1. Fork this repo and work on your enhancements. See note on Commitizen below.
2. Ensure that you include unit tests and jsdoc annotations.
3. Ensure that yarn test passes.
4. Use yarn commit for conventional commits.
5. Raise a pull request.

Commitizen

This project uses commitizen for conventional commit messages via git cz instead of git commit. The reason for this is that it attaches meaning to each commit that is useful to others, and that is used to automatically version new releases based on http://semver.org

Just use yarn commit instead of git commit and follow instructions.