How do you handle feature flags?

We're about to implement feature flags at work and I'm evaluating our options:

- **Environment variables** — Simple but requires redeploy
- **Database-backed** — Flexible but adds queries
- **Flipper gem** — Popular in the Rails world
- **LaunchDarkly** — Full-featured but pricey

For our use case (small team, ~20 flags), I'm leaning toward Flipper. It has a nice UI and supports percentage rollouts.

What do you all use?

Comments (3)

We use Flipper and love it. The UI is great for non-developers to toggle features, and the ActiveRecord adapter means no additional infrastructure.

alice

For small projects, I just use a YAML file that gets loaded at boot. Not dynamic, but dead simple and works with SQLite.

hank_the_tank

Whatever you choose, make sure you have a process for cleaning up old flags. We had over 200 flags at one point and it was a nightmare.