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Refactoring Series

Feature Flags

Use different feature flags to ease the development or feature release process.

OverviewUnderstanding the CodebaseDevelopment FlagsFeature FlagsFallback and Server Side FlagsSummary

Overview

In this refactoring series, you will learn the fundamentals of feature flags and the quickest flags you can build right away!

Specifically, we will build the following components and hooks for flagging:

  • useDevelopmentFlag and DevelopmentFlag
  • useFeatureFlag and FeatureFlag

But first, let us understand the core fundamental of a feature flag.

What is a Feature Flag?

At its core, it is a condition that decides whether something is active or not.

const isNewButton = useFlag('new-button');
 
if (isNewButton) {
  return; // New Button
} else {
  return; // Existing Button
}

You can extend this fundamental to more complex scenarios such as A/B testing, phased rollouts, etc.

Yes, that's it! Nothing special about it. But it is an indispensable tool when it comes to refactoring codebases—especially legacy ones.

Starter Code

The code is in this repo: 0-init

Getting Started

  1. Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/yaralahruthik/refactoring-feature-flags.git
cd refactoring-feature-flags
  1. Install dependencies using pnpm:
pnpm install
  1. Run the development server:
pnpm dev

Your project should now be running at http://localhost:5173 (or the port shown in your terminal).

We've created a dummy project that utilizes MUI v5, and by the end, we'll deprecate MUI v5 in favor of Mantine. The choice of Mantine is just an example—you can essentially replace any library this way with another.

Why not just upgrade MUI v5 to v6 or v7?

Well, from our experience, such codebases are often quite out of control, and replacement is usually far easier than upgrades when it comes to UI libraries. Here are the top two reasons:

  1. Upgrades can cause regressions across the app, while replacement is much more controlled.
  2. Customizing MUI to fit your new design is often more painful than simply bringing in a library that already aligns with it.

But before you decide on such a migration in a production codebase, discuss it with your team and proceed accordingly.

Note that these kinds of decisions—like choosing a completely different UI or routing library—are quite common at startups. During early growth, teams often prioritize shipping features over polishing the underlying architecture or design.

Great, in the next section, we will clone the starter project, and try to understand what we want to do!