Before clicking New Flag

There is one decision that changes the rest of the flow:

• Boolean: use it when you only need a simple on/off switch.
• Rollout: use it when you want percentage-based releases, progressive exposure, and lower risk.

If you are not sure which one to choose yet, start conservatively:

• choose Boolean for administrative features, internal toggles, and simple validations
• choose Rollout for gradual releases, canary deploys, and experiments with a partial audience

1. Create or choose a project

In the dashboard, go to Organizations -> your org -> New Project. Give the project a name that clearly represents the application or domain that owns the flags, such as checkout-web or billing-api.

If the project already exists, reuse it. The important part is to avoid mixing flags from different systems inside the same project unless there is a clear reason.

2. Select an environment

Each project has independent environments, such as staging and production. The same flag can exist in both environments with different states.

Choose the environment where the flag should be created first. In general:

• start with staging to validate behavior and naming
• move to production when the rule is clear

3. Create the flag

Click New Flag and fill in:

Best practices for the Name field:

• prefer short, stable, behavior-oriented names such as new-checkout
• avoid generic names like test or feature-1
• do not include the environment in the flag name; CanaryGate already separates that for you

4. Activate the flag

After creation, the flag starts disabled by default.

• For Boolean flags, activating means releasing it to everyone in that environment.
• For Rollout flags, activating usually comes with the initial percentage you want to release.

5. Read it in the SDK

const flag = canary.getFlag('new-checkout')
 
if (!flag) {
  console.warn('Flag new-checkout is not available yet')
}
 
if (flag?.enabled ?? false) {
  renderNewCheckout()
} else {
  renderCurrentCheckout()
}

If flag comes back as undefined, it usually indicates one of these situations:

• init() has not finished yet
• the flag was created in a different environment
• the flag name in code does not match the name saved in the dashboard

Next steps

• Understand boolean flags vs rollout
• Configure percentage rollout
• Do the minimum SDK integration