A Web dashboard for the FunWithFlags Elixir package.
FunWithFlags.UI
is just a plug and it can be run in a number of ways.
It's primarily meant to be embedded in a host Plug application, either Phoenix or another Plug app.
The router plug can be mounted inside the Phoenix router with Phoenix.Router.forward/4
.
defmodule MyPhoenixAppWeb.Router do
use MyPhoenixAppWeb, :router
pipeline :mounted_apps do
plug :accepts, ["html"]
plug :put_secure_browser_headers
end
scope path: "/feature-flags" do
pipe_through :mounted_apps
forward "/", FunWithFlags.UI.Router, namespace: "feature-flags"
end
end
Note: There is no need to add :protect_from_forgery
to the :mounted_apps
pipeline because this package already implements CSRF protection. In order to enable it, your host application must use the Plug.Session
plug, which is usually configured in the endpoint module in Phoenix.
Since it's just a plug, it can also be mounted into any other Plug application using Plug.Router.forward/2
.
defmodule Another.App do
use Plug.Router
forward "/feature-flags", to: FunWithFlags.UI.Router, init_opts: [namespace: "feature-flags"]
end
Note: If your plug router uses Plug.CSRFProtection
, FunWithFlags.UI.Router
should be added before your CSRF protection plug because it already implements its own CSRF protection. If you declare FunWithFlags.UI.Router
after, your CSRF plug will likely block GET requests for the JS assets of the dashboard.
Again, because it's just a plug, it can be run standalone.
If you clone the repository, the library comes with two convenience functions to accomplish this:
# Simple, let Cowboy sort out the supervision tree:
{:ok, pid} = FunWithFlags.UI.run_standalone()
# Uses some explicit supervision configuration:
{:ok, pid} = FunWithFlags.UI.run_supervised()
These functions come in handy for local development, and are not necessary when embedding the Plug into a host application.
Please note that even though the FunWithFlags.UI
module implements the Application
behavior and comes with a proper start/2
callback, this is not enabled by design and, in fact, the Mixfile doesn't declare an entry module.
If you really need to run it standalone in a reliable manner, you are encouraged to write your own supervision setup.
For obvious reasons, you don't want to make this web control panel publicly accessible.
The library itself doesn't provide any auth functionality because, as a Plug, it is easier to wrap it into the authentication and authorization logic of the host application.
The easiest thing to do is to protect it with HTTP Basic Auth, provided by Plug itself.
For example, in Phoenix:
defmodule MyPhoenixAppWeb.Router do
use MyPhoenixAppWeb, :router
+ import Plug.BasicAuth
pipeline :mounted_apps do
plug :accepts, ["html"]
plug :put_secure_browser_headers
+ plug :basic_auth, username: "foo", password: "bar"
end
scope path: "/feature-flags" do
pipe_through :mounted_apps
forward "/", FunWithFlags.UI.Router, namespace: "feature-flags"
end
end
While the base fun_with_flags
library is quite relaxed in terms of valid flag names, group names and actor identifers, this web dashboard extension applies some more restrictive rules.
The reason is that all fun_with_flags
cares about is that some flag and group names can be represented as an Elixir Atom, while actor IDs are just strings. Since you can use that API in your code, the library will only check that the parameters have the right type.
Things change on the web, however. Think about the binary "Ook? Ook!"
. In code, it can be accepted as a valid flag name:
{:ok, true} = FunWithFlags.enable(:"Ook? Ook!", for_group: :"weird, huh?")
On the web, however, the question mark makes working with URLs a bit tricky: in http://localhost:8080/flags/Ook?%20Ook!
, the flag name will be Ook
and the rest will be a query string.
For this reason this library enforces some stricter rules when creating flags and groups. Blank values are not allowed, ?
neither, and flag names must match /^w+$/
.
The package can be installed by adding fun_with_flags_ui
to your list of dependencies in mix.exs
.
It requires fun_with_flags
, see its installation documentation for more details.
def deps do
[{:fun_with_flags_ui, "~> 0.8"}]
end