Unleash 6.0

Hello! We are very excited to announce a new major version of Unleash, v6.0! Now I know a major version upgrade sounds large and daunting, but that’s not the case here. We’ve made some significant UX and performance improvements, deprecated some old components, and dropped support for older technologies (hence the major version).

New: Sidebar Navigation Menu

Before this change, you navigated Unleash via the top left navigation and its dropdown menus, via the user avatar and its menu, and a series of options after clicking the gear icon.

With Unleash v6, we simplified all of this to make using and navigating in Unleash easier and faster. We moved all these items under a single, collapsible sidebar. Every item is directly accessible and comes with its own icon, and your recent projects and flags will be shown at the bottom. The sidebar also remembers which section you expand/collapse between sessions.

New: “My projects” view

Before this, all your projects in Unleash were sorted alphabetically, with favorited projects showing up first. This could get unwieldy in large instances with many teams owning multiple projects.

As part of our efforts to make Unleash faster and easier to use in this release, we’ve revamped this UI too. There is a new section called “My projects” at the top of the project list, which shows you projects you’ve been added to, and your starred/favorited projects.

New: Insights dashboard

We added a new Insights Dashboard that gives you information on how your Unleash instance is performing. We’re particularly excited about the average time to production chart. Time to production is an important DORA metric, and reducing this value is key to driving DevOps efficiency. Now you can measure it with Unleash, and compare across projects.

You can find details like the following over time:

• Users (view and manage them)
• Flags & flags per user (track usage and health)
• Health statistics (how flags are changing)
• Average time to Production
• Flag evaluations
• Updates per environment

Insights can be filtered by project to identify high-performing groups/teams at your organization, so you can learn about what makes them successful and spread that knowledge to other teams.

Improved: Project Overview

We’ve improved the main project view. There’s more space on the list of flags, and we’re now showing, for each flag, its descriptions, tags, and its parent/child relationship. We also moved all the old metrics and info from the previous section to the insights tab.

This makes it easier to find out data about flags without clicking into the flag itself and understand your project’s status without being bothered by health metrics.

Updated: Renamed “Feature Toggle” to “Feature Flag”

We updated the UI and the docs to use the term “feature flag” over the former “feature toggle.” We feel this reflects the current industry consensus better, and makes it easier for newcomers.

The API and endpoints will stay the same, with no breaking changes.

Updated: The “outdated SDK” banner is now on projects

Previously, if one of your clients connected to your Unleash instance with an outdated SDK, a banner would pop up to warn you.

Now this banner will only be shown on the project that used an outdated SDK, rather than anywhere in your instance, which makes it easier to find out where the calls are coming from.

Breaking Changes and Deprecations

As a dev I’m excited when I can move old versions of stuff out of my infrastructure, so here we go:

• Dropped support for Postgres < 13: We’re dropping support for older Postgres versions (v10, v11, v12) that are no longer maintained and secure. Make sure to upgrade your database if you haven’t.
• Dropped support for Node.js < v20: Node.js 20 is now the LTS version, so there’s no reason for us not to support it. On top of that, we benefited from increased performance, and security updates. This only affects you if you do not use the Docker image and build Unleash yourself.
• Removed Deprecated Custom Google SSO: Leverage more modern authentication methods like SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect which are also supported by Google Authentication.
• Removed Deprecated API Endpoints: We’ve removed the legacy /api/feature endpoint as it’s been deprecated since Unleash v4.4.
• Deprecated Custom Strategies: Consider using constraints as a recommended alternative for more flexible and powerful control.
• Deprecated Feature Variants: This is being deprecated in favor of “strategy variants”. New feature flags will have feature variants hidden by default. If flags already use feature variants they will continue to be seen and used in the UI.

Other updates:

• Mandate for License Key: Unleash Enterprise (Self-hosted) now requires a valid license key.

That was a lot, but tons of exciting things.

Thanks for reading.