Workflow
Building datafiles
Datafiles are JSON files that are created against combinations of tags and environments. They are used to evaluate features in your application via Featurevisor SDKs.
Usage#
Use Featurevisor CLI to build your datafiles:
$ npx featurevisor build
Output#
The build output can be found in the datafiles
directory.
If your featurevisor.config.js
file looks like this:
module.exports = { tags: ['all'], environments: ['staging', 'production'],}
Then the contents of your datafiles
directory will look like this:
$ tree datafiles.├── production│ └── featurevisor-tag-all.json└── staging └── featurevisor-tag-all.json2 directories, 2 files
Next to datafiles, the build process will also generate some additional JSON files that we can learn more about in State files.
Revision#
By default, Featurevisor will increment the revision number as found in .featurevisor/REVISION
file (learn more in state files).
Custom revision#
You can optionally customize the revision
value when building datafiles by passing a --revision
flag:
$ npx featurevisor build --revision 1.2.3
Revision from hash#
If instead of an incremented revision, you want to use the hash of the individual datafile content, you can pass --revision-from-hash
:
$ npx featurevisor build --revision-from-hash
If in a particular datafile the content has not changed, the revision will remain the same as the previous build.
This is useful for caching purposes.
No state files#
If you wish to build datafiles without making any changes to state files, you can pass the --no-state-files
flag:
$ npx featurevisor build --no-state-files
Printing#
You can print the contents of a datafile for a single feature or all the features in an environment without writing anything to disk by passing these flags:
$ npx featurevisor build \ --feature=foo \ --environment=production \ --json \ --pretty
Or if you with to print datafile containing all features for a specific environment:
$ npx featurevisor build --environment=production --json --pretty
This is useful primarily for debugging and testing purposes.
If you are an SDK developer in other languages besides JavaScript, you may want to use this handy command to get the generated datafile content in JSON format that you can use in your own test runner.
Datafiles directory#
By default, datafiles will be generated in the datafiles
directory, or your custom directory if you have specified it under datafilesDirectoryPath
in your featurevisor.config.js
file.
You can optionally override it from CLI:
$ npx featurevisor build --datafiles-dir=./custom-directory
Schema version#
If you are using older Featurevisor v1 SDKs, you can build datafiles in the v1 schema format by passing the --schema=version=1
flag:
# finish regular build first$ npx featurevisor build# then build v1-compatible datafiles$ npx featurevisor build \ --schema-version=1 \ --datafiles-dir=./datafiles/v1 \ --no-state-files