Question

We run 2 different environments on our server – say, production.mydomain.com and staging.mydomain.com

The staging environment is nearly identical to the production environment, except that it often has several new features which are being reviewed (eg new_user_profile, image_tagging, etc). These features are individually accepted by the client at different times.

What is the best way to push any individual feature (eg new_user_profile) from staging to production?

Our setup is listed below, but would like to hear alternatives you use also:

• Ruby on Rails
• Git (we have several feature branches, which get merged into a “staging” branch when nearing completion)
• Capistrano, with multi-staging ext.

We have tried the following two approaches, neither of which works terribly well:

1. Having lots of if/else statements throughout our code, eg if new_user_profile ….
2. Deploying individual git branches (eg branch new_user_profile) to staging, getting this reviewed, and then merging to production

Answer 1

Without additional ifs, your best bet would probably be to merge feature branches into master when they’re ready to deploy. Alternatively, you could implement a feature toggle pattern. I don’t know that there’s a common gem for it, but I’ve used a similar pattern in my own projects. Martin Fowler wrote a good post on feature toggles here if you want to check it out. He makes a pretty valid argument that feature branches go against ideas of continuous integration. I don’t feel so strongly about that, so long as the branches are being run through a CI server, but your milage may vary. I’d like to see a good library that just uses blocks with a feature toggle, so you could do something like:

with_feature :something do
  #code that should only be enabled with :something feature
end

Dont know of a well implemented solution for that though. Make a gem and put it on github 🙂