grunt-redact

What's this?

Pre-runtime feature toggle support for static applications where toggle-related code can't be delivered to the client.

Do you need pre-runtime feature toggle support for your client-side JavaScript app? Then you've come to the right place.

Why?

In most scenarios client-side feature toggling is enough and you can get away with simple toggling mechanisms in your client-side app. However, in scenarios where clients simply cannot have any access to half-baked or hidden features, you need something that will remove all traces that there was ever any feature toggle in your codebase.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.2

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-redact --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-redact');

The "redact" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named redact to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  redact: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  },
});

The task will redact JavaScript (**/*.js) and HTML (**/*.html) files inside the directory specified on workingDirectory.

HTML files

<span feature="facebookLogin">Facebook login goes here</span>
<span not-feature="facebookLogin">Sorry, we do not support Facebook login yet</span>

JavaScript files

if (feature.facebookLogin) {
  console.log('WE HAZ FACEBOOK LOGIN');
}

Options

workingDirectory

Type: String

Location of files to be redacted. For example, it can be the path where you run your application when using grunt server.

Note: this should not be your source code folder, since files are edited in place—it should be a target folder from where you run your app, where file contents are disposable (and most likely ignored by your source control tool.)

toggleStatesFile

Type: String

Location of the JSON file that contains your feature toggles and their respective states.

The file should contain a simple JavaScript object with the feature names and their respective states. For example:

{
  "googleLogin": true,
  "facebookLogin": false
}

Usage Examples

On your Gruntfile.js:

grunt.initConfig({
  redact: {
    options: {
      workingDirectory: "target/"
    },
    jasmine: {
      options: {
        toggleStatesFile: "spec/toggleStatesForSpecs.json",
        workingDirectory: "target/jasmine/"
      }
    },
    watch: {
      options: {
        toggleStatesFile: "target/devToggleStates.json"
      }
    }
  },
});