Applications and Environments

Applications and Environments are fundamental concepts in Beacon that determine the policy used to evaluate a feature flags current state.

Applications

An Application in Beacon represents a single Laravel project or service. Feature Flag configurations are tied to a specific environment for a given application.

NOTE

Applications are team-scoped, meaning each team will have its own set of applications. Application names should be unique within a team.

Application Configuration

When configuring your Laravel application to use Beacon, you specify the application name in your configuration:

BEACON_APP_NAME=my-laravel-app

Environments

Environments allow you to have different feature flag configurations for different deployment stages of the same application.

Common Environment Types

• Local: Local development environment
• Testing: Automated testing environment
• Staging: Pre-production testing environment
• Production: Live production environment

Environment Configuration

Set the environment in your Laravel application configuration:

# .env
BEACON_ENVIRONMENT=production

Working with Applications and Environments

Creating Applications and Environments

Applications and Environments within Beacon are automatically created when your application makes its first request to Beacon with a new application or environment name. This makes it easy to add new applications and environments without manual configuration.

Feature Flag Configuration

When evaluating feature flags, Beacon considers the team's feature flag configuration for the specific application-environment combination:

1. Team-Level Feature Flags: Each team owns their feature flags with one instance per flag
2. Application-Environment Configuration: Each flag can have specific configurations for different application-environment contexts

Example Workflow

Here's a typical workflow for managing feature flags across applications and environments:

1. Development Phase

// In your development environment
Feature::define('new-checkout-flow');

if (Feature::active('new-checkout-flow')) {
    // Test new checkout implementation
}

2. Staging Deployment

• Deploy code to staging environment
• Enable the feature flag in staging for testing
• Verify functionality with staging data

3. Production Rollout

• Deploy code to production environment
• Start with feature flag disabled or at low percentage
• Gradually increase rollout based on metrics and feedback