Projects

Overview

This topic explains what projects are in LaunchDarkly, and how you can use them to manage different priorities, teams, and tasks across your organization.

Understanding projects

Projects let you manage multiple different business objectives from one LaunchDarkly account. For example, you can create one project called "Mobile App" and another project called "Web App." Every project has its own unique set of environments and feature flags.

Environments are organizational units contained within a project. To learn more, read Environments.

Set up a project to serve one set of end users. Sorting your flags into related chunks of functionality based on their impact on end users helps you logically organize related flags.

A common pattern is to map each project in your LaunchDarkly instance to a specific product your company makes. For example, a mobile application, web app, and back-end services that are presented to a customer as one product might all fit in one project because they likely will share most flags. To learn about other common patterns for mapping your architecture with LaunchDarkly, read Implementing LaunchDarkly Project Architecture Best Practices.

Here is a diagram of two example projects, "Web App" and "Mobile App":

Customers on a Pro or Enterprise plan have access to 300 projects per account by default. Customers on a Starter plan have access to one project. To request an increase to your project limit, contact Support.

Projects and environments

You can create multiple environments within each project. All projects must have at least one environment.

Environments allow you to manage your feature flags throughout your entire development lifecycle, from local development through production. Typical environments within a project could be Production, QA, Staging, or individual environments.

To learn more, read Environments.

Creating projects

When you first create your LaunchDarkly account, you start with a Default project, and all account members in your account have access to every project within your account by default. Your current project is visible in the top of the sidenav. You must always have at least one project.

To create a new project:

1. Navigate to the Account settings page.
2. Click the Projects tab.
3. Click Create project. The "Create a project" panel appears.
4. Give your project a human-readable Name.
5. (Optional) Give your project a unique Key. This field populates automatically based on your name, but you can change it now if you wish.

6. (Optional) Assign Tags to your project.
7. Click Create project. The new project appears in the Account settings page:

Deleting projects

You can delete a project when you are no longer using it. Delete with caution, as deleting a project is permanent and also deletes all of the environments and flags within it.

To delete a project:

1. Navigate to the Account settings page.
2. Click the Projects tab.
3. Click the name of the project you want to delete.
4. Click into the Settings tab.
5. Click Delete project. A "Delete project?" dialog appears.
6. Enter the name or key of your project in the Confirm field.
7. Click Delete.

Your project is now deleted.

Project flag defaults

You can optionally configure flag defaults which LaunchDarkly applies to new flags you create within the project. Some settings apply to all flag types, and other settings apply only to boolean flags. You can override the defaults when you create a new flag. If you change a project's flag defaults, LaunchDarkly does not retroactively apply the new defaults to existing flags.

Setting project flag defaults

To access a project's flag defaults:

1. Navigate to the Projects tab under Account settings
2. Click on the project name. The Environments tab appears.
3. Click the Flag defaults tab.

All flag types support the following defaults:

• The Mark flags as permanent checkbox determines whether new flags should be permanent or temporary.
• The Make available for Mobile SDK and Make available for Client-side checkboxes determine whether new flags should be available to mobile and/or client-side SDKs.
• The Default tags field adds listed tags to new flags.

In addition, boolean flags support the following defaults:

• The Display name fields set the name of true and false variations of new flags.
• The Description fields set the description for true and false variations of new flags.
• The Default on behavior determines which variation a new flag will serve when the flag's targeting is on and the context did not match any targeting rules.
• The Off behavior determines which variation a new flag will serve when the flag's targeting is off.

To learn more about these default settings, read Other flag settings.