Flipper::Notifications

Rails-compatible Slack notifications when Flipper flags are updated.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'flipper-notifications'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install flipper-notifications

• Ruby 3
• ActiveSupport 7

This gem is designed to work within a Rails app. At the very least, you will need activesupport since that library drives instrumentation from Flipper itself.

After you initialize Flipper, you can also configure Flipper::Notifications.

# config/initializers/flipper.rb

Flipper.configure do |config|
  config.adapter { ... }
end

Flipper::Notifications.configure do |config|
  # You have to enable notifications; you probably only want notifications enabled in production.
  config.enabled = true

  slack_webhook = Flipper::Notifications::Webhooks::Slack.new(url: ENV.fetch("SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL"))

  config.notifiers = [
    Flipper::Notifications::Notifiers::WebhookNotifier.new(webhook: slack_webhook)
  ]
end

This gem provides an implementation to send notifications to Slack via an incoming webhook. If you want to integrate with a service other than Slack, you may wish to implement your own Webhook by following the pattern established by this gem. If you implement your own Webhook, and you have a Rails app that uses ActiveJob, you can use the Flipper::Notifications::WebhookNotificationJob provided by this gem to send webhook requests asynchronously. The job also includes a sensible retry strategy just in case the internet or your notification service is having a bad day.

Your Webhook can start by inheriting from Flipper::Notifications::Webhook. The Webhook base class defines an initializer that takes one keyword argument, url. You only need to implement an instance method named notify. The notify method should take keyword arguments. Within the notify method you have access to HTTParty methods for sending requests. In the end, your Webhook might look something like this:

class MyWebhook < Flipper::Notifications::Webhook

  def notify(foo:, bar:)
    webhook_api_errors do
      self.class.post(@url, body: { foo: foo, bar: bar }.to_json)
    end
  end

end

The webhook_api_errors helper wraps common API errors as specific Flipper::Notifications error types:

• Flipper::Notifications::ClientError - 4XX HTTP responses
• Flipper::Notifications::ServerError - 5XX HTTP responses
• Flipper::Notifications::NetworkError - Timeouts

You may want to implement notifications without using the Webhook pattern described above. If so, all you have to do is implement your own Notifier. A Notifier is any object that responds to a call method with a keyword argument named event. You can use a lambda as your notifier if you prefer. Using a lambda can come in handy if you want to provide additional context to your notifications.

Flipper::Notifications.configure do |config|
  webhook = Flipper::Notifications::Webhooks::Slack.new(url: ENV.fetch("SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL"))

  notifier = ->(event:) do
    context = "#{Rails.env} (changed by: #{Current.user.email})"
    Flipper::Notifications::WebhookNotificationJob.perform_later(webhook: webhook, event: event, context_markdown: context)
  end

  config.notifiers = [notifier]
end

The event object will be a Flipper::Notifications::FeatureEvent.

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bundle exec rspec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

After merging in the new functionality to the main branch, you can run the following to push a new version of the gem to rubygems.org:

git checkout main
git pull
bundle exec rake version:bump:<major, minor, or patch>
bundle exec rubocop -a
git commit -a --amend --no-edit
bundle exec rake release

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/wrapbook/flipper-notifications. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the Flipper::Notifications project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.