In a post to his site Alfred Nutile has posted a guide to integrating feature flags (toggles) into your Laravel-based application to show and hide features based on different criteria. He makes use of the Atriedes/feature library to handle some of the logic and decisions for him.

We are working on using FeatureFlags or Toggles in our applications. For one we are aiming to do all our work on mainline branch at all times so this would be a key coding discipline to use FeatureFlags so we can hide a feature in progress knowing it will not interfere with the application.

[...] One key thing, as I use this in Laravel, is I will try and mix this with the existing Authorization workflow that is already present. This gives me some already prepared ways to think about this both at the view layer, model layer and controller layer and where to register these states.

He shows how to get the "feature" library installed and integrates it with the Laravel application via two service providers: one for the core flag handling and the other for defining the policies themselves. He includes the code for each of these providers and makes some simple "can see" and "can add" policies for a Twitter field. He also shows the code for the evaluation methods and how to make use of the functionality in a menu (template). He also includes a screencast showing how it all works in a live application.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to use the Toggle library from Qandidate to handle the enabling and disabling of features in your application.

A frequently used development workflow in version control systems is feature branching. The idea is that we develop new features in branches other than the master one. After a feature is tested and ready to be released, it is merged back into the master branch or a release branch for deployment. This approach helps us develop new features without disturbing the main code base.

However, developing a feature branch might take much longer than a normal release cycle. [...] One of the techniques widely used as an alternative to feature branching is feature toggling. Feature toggles (or feature flippers) act like on/off switches. [...] We can temporarily hide a partially built or risky feature (release toggles) or limit finished stable features to a certain group of users (business toggles).

They introduce the basics of the Toggle library and it's main components: the Manager, Toggles, Operators, Conditions and Context. These are all combined together to help determine if a feature should be enabled or hidden. Examples of each are included along the way as well as one showing a toggle in action. They also show how to integrate it with a framework, in this case a Laravel project as middleware. The post ends with a look at strategies, giving you even more customization around the conditions of the toggle (example: Affirmative, Majority and Unanimous), statues and creating the conditions from either YAML or array configurations.