Flying Feature Flags with LaunchDarkly's New Plugin for Gatsby

LaunchDarkly, a feature management system, has been used to control and manage the release of features in various applications. The company decided to migrate its public-facing documentation site from a managed service to Gatsby for greater control and a git-based workflow. During this process, they realized that it might be useful to hide certain sections of the site from specific groups of people. They used feature flags to achieve this goal. Feature flags are decision points in code that can change an application's behavior. LaunchDarkly allows developers to ship code to production without revealing it to customers and gradually release features to a growing audience while easily rolling back if needed. The company created a plugin for Gatsby, making it easy to use feature flags in any Gatsby site. The LaunchDarkly plugin for Gatsby is powered by the LaunchDarkly React SDK, which uses server-sent events to stream feature flag updates to a site in real-time. This allows developers to control feature availability instantly without users having to refresh the page. The plugin can be used for various purposes such as gradually rolling out new sections or features of a site, releasing brand redesigns across multiple properties and products, targeting specific user groups with new features, and conducting A/B tests. The LaunchDarkly plugin is open-source, and the company encourages contributions from users.