Skip to main content

Feature flag key naming best practices

· 2 min read
Zoltan David
Zoltan David
One with a vision, answers and a master plan.

"Thank you guys, you rock."​

We love to get emails like the one above. And sometimes we do. 😃 Actually, more often than I've ever dared to imagine.

Part of the reason our users love us (well, when they do) are those million little tweaks we do to our feature flag service on a daily basis.

Normally we don't share those little tweaks and updates - which is a bad business practice actually. This time I've decided to share one such update that lets you fine-tune how feature flag keys are auto-generated for you. Yes, it's a niche thing.

Gals/guys, glasses and other important things in life​

Your significant other, your glasses (if you have a pair, as I do) and the right variable naming conventions. It's important they are compatible with your other life choices.

ConfigCat has always helped you to name your feature flag keys, by camelCasing the feature flag's name. Most of our users who use languages like C#, or Java were happy with this practice. But ConfigCat is a

Cross-platform feature flag service​

This means ConfigCat has SDKs for .NET/C#, Java, Android, iOS, Node, Javascript, Python, Go, and PHP. It turned out part of our user base wanted snake_case_names for feature flag keys because that fits better their platform's conventions.

Feature flag key formats​

If you want snake_case_names, what you can do is changing your preferences in ConfigCat's Dashboard. feature flag key generation preference

After that ConfigCat will auto-generate the feature flag keys in the format of your choice. auto generated feature flag key