woocommerce/plugins/woocommerce-admin/docs/feature-flags.md

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Feature Flags

Features inside the wc-admin repository can be in various states of completeness. In addition to the development copy of wc-admin, feature plugin versions are bundled, and code is merged to WooCommerce core. To provide a way for improved control over how these features are released in these different environments, wc-admin has a system for feature flags.

We currently support the following environments:

Environment Description
development Development - All features should be enabled in development. These flags are also used in both JS and PHP tests. Ran using npm start.
plugin Plugin - A packaged release of the featured plugin, for GitHub WordPress.org. Ran using npm run-script build:release.
core Core - assets/files ready and stable enough for core merge. Ran using npm pack. (@todo update this with publish command).

Adding a new flag

Flags can be added to the files located in the config/ directory. Make sure to add a flag for each environment and explicitly set the flag to false. Please add new feature flags alphabetically so they are easy to find.

Basic Use - Client

The window.wcAdminFeatures constant is a global variable containing the feature flags.

Instances of window.wcAdminFeatures are replaced during the webpack build process by using webpack's define plugin. Using webpack for this allows us to eliminate dead code when making minified/production builds (plugin, or core environments).

To check if a feature is enabled, you can simplify check the boolean value of a feature:

{ window.wcAdminFeatures[ 'activity-panels' ] && <ActivityPanel /> }

We also expose CSS classes on the body tag, so that you can target specific feature states when they are enabled:

<body class="wp-admin woocommerce-page woocommerce-feature-enabled-activity-panels  ....">

Basic Use - Server

Feature flags are also available via PHP. To ensure these are consistent with the built client assets, includes/feature-flags.php is generated by the plugin build process or npm start. Do not edit includes/feature-flags.php directly.

To check if a feature is enabled, you can use the WC_Admin_Loader::is_feature_enabled():

if ( WC_Admin_Loader::is_feature_enabled( 'activity-panels' ) ) {
	add_action( 'admin_header', 'wc_admin_activity_panel' );
}

If you name a directory after the flag in includes/ with a class-wc-admin-FEATURE.php file, this code will also automatically be loaded.