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Feature Toggling

Spring Profiles

Our APIs are now consistently leveraging Spring Profiles to enable certain features in the deployed environment and as a fail-safe to back off a feature.

Features are written to be disabled by default. They are only activated by telling Spring which feature-specific profile names are active. There are many mechanisms Spring allows to do this, but we prefer the simplicity and priority of the SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE environment variable.

The environment variable can contain multiple features by using a comma-delimited list. For example, the following could be used on the search API:

export SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE="sitemap,login-gov"

Admin Service (admin)

Spring Profile	Feature Description	Default Value
icam	Enables a Spring security filter to require ICAM CAC authentication and authorization to hit particular endpoints. Requires a configured ICAM keystore and credentials at runtime! We don’t expect this feature to be enabled in 2.1 production, and the production environment would need to create and configure its own keystore as well as register its public key and other Service Provider (SP) metadata to ICAM.	false
manual-upload	Enables the UploadController which opens browser endpoints for manual metadata upload. This feature should always be set with the icam profile in production to ensure manual upload is CAC secured.	false
kafka-ingest	Enables the KafkaConsumerService to upload metadata via PSI. This feature should never be enabled at the same time as the manual-upload feature as they are mutually exclusive approaches to metadata upload.	false
sitemap	Enables the SitemapETLService to create the sitemap index and periodically refresh it.	false

Search Service (search)

Spring Profile	Feature Description	Default Value
login‑gov	Enables a Spring security filter to enable OpenId authentication via login.gov. This also triggers the uiConfig endpoint to show an auth section which indicates to the client to show a login link. Note: This feature will eventually migrate to a new user service with a PostgreSQL backing DB. Requires a configured ICAM keystore and credentials at runtime! We don’t expect this feature to be enabled in 2.1 production, and the production environment would need to create and configure its own keystore as well as register its public key and other Service Provider (SP) metadata to login.gov.	false
sitemap	Enables a the /sitemap.xml and /sitemap/{id}.txt public endpoints.	false

Sitemap (Additional Config Required)

The search API ultimately constructs the sitemap content by deriving information from Elasticsearch and constructing links to known routes in our OneStop browser client.

To be enabled correctly, the sitemap feature must be enabled in both search and admin.

Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a way to dynamically determine where the client is hosted (from the search API’s perspective). So this is left to a manual configuration via two additional environment variables (SITEMAP_CLIENT_PATH and SITEMAP_API_PATH) for the search API to consume.

ENV	SITEMAP_CLIENT_PATH	SITEMAP_API_PATH
DEV	https://cedardevs.org/onestop	https://cedardevs.org/onestop-search
TEST	https://`<testClientHost>`/onestop	https://`<testSearchHost>`/onestop-search
PROD	https://`<prodClientHost>`/onestop	https://`<prodSearchHost>`/onestop-search

Note: Sitemap is a new feature and we haven’t had the ability to see how it performs at scale. We’ve only been able to see it run on the order of 10K entries versus the millions of entries or more we would encounter in production.

If it is determined the feature is inefficient with Elasticsearch resources during our trial runs in the test environment, we have two options:

Configure the re-indexing delay, frequency, scroll size, and submap size of the sitemap

Update the admin config YML with

etl.sitemap.delay.initial: <delay in ms>

etl.sitemap.delay.fixed: <frequency in ms>

etl.sitemap.scroll-size: <ES scroll size>

etl.sitemap.collections-per-submap: <submap size limit>

Disable the feature entirely (see the “Feature Toggling” section below)

In the future, we could prevent some performance concerns in a couple of ways:

Improvement: Use the upcoming features of PSI to populate the Elasticsearch indices in a streaming way (prevent batching).

Preferred: Have the ability for our API to manage a static file server so that we don’t have to store sitemap information in Elasticsearch.

Google Analytics and UI Cart Toggle

There are two new sections to the search API UI config YML.

If the cart feature is desired, simply add the features config section as seen below. Without it, the UI will default to not showing a cart feature.
Google Analytics can be configured by replacing the following parts with the appropriate IDs for the test and prod environments. When using multiple trackers, you must provide a name for additional trackers. There can only be one default (without a name), and the one without a name will only receive updates depending on reactGaOptions.alwaysSendToDefaultTracker. See Google Analytics and react-ga4 documentation for more details.
- trackingId: 'XXXXXXXXX'
- name: XXXXXXXXX

 ui:
    googleAnalytics:
      profiles:
        - trackingId: 'UA-XXXXXXXXX-X'
          gaOptions:
            name: XXXXXXXXX
      reactGaOptions:
        alwaysSendToDefaultTracker: false
    features:
      - cart
    disclaimer:
      message: DEMO - This site is not running on NCEI hardware, does not contain NCEI's full data holdings, and contains a limited set of its intended functionality.
    featured:
      - title: Super Important Featured Dataset 1
        searchTerm: '"Gridded Satellite GOES"'
        imageUrl: "https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/gridsat/images/sample.png"
      - ...

Sanity Checks

A runtime sanity check to determine if you’ve properly enabled a Spring profile is to check the first few lines of the Spring application log output. For example, if you enabled the sitemap profile, you would see a log like:

The following profiles are active: sitemap

See Trending Searches. Note, however, that this feature is stale.

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