Scheduled flag changes
Read time: 3 minutes
Last edited: Dec 14, 2024
Scheduled flag changes are only available to customers on select plans. To learn more, read about our pricing. To upgrade your plan, contact Sales.
Overview
This topic explains what scheduled flag changes are and how to use them to manage your releases.
Scheduling flag changes lets you define and schedule changes to your flag’s targeting rules for future points in time. You can create a progressive delivery strategy by scheduling the incremental steps to release your feature to 100% of your user base.
For example, you can schedule a feature to turn on for internal testing two days from today, then enable it for your ‘beta’ customer segment four days later, and finally start an automated rollout increasing to 100% over the following five days.
You can also support this example use case using release pipelines. Release pipelines let you move flags through a series of phases, rolling out flags to selected environments and audiences following automated steps. For each phase, you select the environment, audience, and rollout strategy, as well as whether approvals are required.
We recommend using release pipelines if they meet your needs, because they are easier to set up and are repeatable across flags. This can help you standardize your release process across your organization.
To learn more, read Release pipelines.
You can also use the REST API: Scheduled changes
Benefits of scheduling flag changes
Benefits of scheduling flag changes include:
- Timing an early launch: Scheduling your flag to turn on or off on a specified date/time lets you plan your release without having to manually make changes at desired release times.
- Progressive feature rollouts: Scheduled flag changes are one of several ways you can create a set of scheduled changes to your flag, and have LaunchDarkly slowly release the feature for you. For example, you can schedule your flag to roll out to 20% of your user base tomorrow, 35% the day after, 50% the day after that, and increase that percentage until it reaches 100%.
- For this use case, we generally recommend the separate progressive rollouts feature instead, because it is easier to set up, and because the flag variation that any particular customer encounters changes only once over the course of the rollout.
- Temporary access: You can schedule rules that target certain contexts and segments to be added to or removed from your flag’s targeting to better manage customer access.
- Flag hygiene: You can schedule your flag’s targeting rules to clean up once your flag has been rolled out to 100% of your user base.
To learn how to create and manage scheduled flag changes, read Creating scheduled flag changes and Managing scheduled flag changes.
View scheduled flag changes
To view all the scheduled changes for a flag:
- Navigate to the Flags list and select the flag for which you want to view the scheduled changes. The flag's Targeting tab appears.
- The number of scheduled changes appear in the upper right corner:
- To view the complete list of changes, click on the clock icon. A panel appears that displays all the pending changes that are scheduled for this flag. The changes are listed chronologically, with the earliest upcoming change listed first.
You can also use the REST API: List scheduled changes.