docs: [FUN-449] Add what is it for doc #507
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| ## What should I use it for? | ||
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| `dev-server` is intended as a replacement for creating certain kinds of environments in the LD app itself that are not part of a flag's release path e.g. Staging, UAT, QA, Production. The most common examples of this are local development environments and ephemeral CI environments. | ||
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| ## What should I not use this for? | ||
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| You should refrain from using `dev-server` for any release path critical environments, as well as environments where complex targeting logic is required. Currently, `dev-server` only supports serving a single variation and supports no targeting logic. |
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I feel like this is saying the same thing twice i.e. "don't use this for anything besides local dev and ephemeral CI environments"
While writing, I kept dreaming up weird use cases for this but I think we want to steer folks away from that kind of thing
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Yeah. I think that there are a few points we want to make here.
- don't ever use the dev server for a prod workload because it might not work
- the dev server is for local dev & CI environments
- because it's for environments with a single user, it's simpler and has fewer features
- no targeting
- the dev server should still guide you to shipping your code safely and minimize surprises as you get to prod
- so you can't create flags, you have to pull them from a real environment and iterate from there
Probably also need a sentence to describe what this doc is, I think it's less of how to use the dev server, but more of like "what is it supposed to do and why".
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@mike-zorn Okay made some pretty significant edits
tvarney13
changed the title
internal/dev_server/manifesto.md
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| We implemented it this way in order to solve a problem common both internally and amongst our userbase where an environment would get created per developer on a project as well as per CI build. As you could expect, this becomes exponentially harder to maintain as the number of environments scales both technically and from a process perspective - something has to clear out those environments after all! | ||
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| Another intentional design decision was the choice not to allow the creation of local-only flags. A running `dev-server` can only pull from a real environment. From there, you can override the served value for your local environment. |
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Rewrite this without mentioning local-only flags. That's a feature we've discussed internally, but isn't something a reader of this doc will know about. I think you want to frame it as "flags must first exist in the source environment" or similar.
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Some minor notes, but looks good otherwise!
Co-authored-by: Mike Zorn <mike@launchdarkly.com>
Co-authored-by: Mike Zorn <mike@launchdarkly.com>
This PR adds the what is it for doc and makes a minor grammar correction in the main README.