Introduction
Why Use Waypost?
Waypost is an open-source, lightweight, self-hosted feature flag management system that specializes in A/B Testing, providing analytical insights for your experiments on both the front-end and back-end.
It is possible to build your own feature flagging system and A/B testing platform, but it’s extremely time-consuming and many companies do not have the resources to do that. Some companies opt to use existing and prominent products such as LaunchDarkly and Optimizely. However, they have their own downsides to consider, such as high costs and loss of ownership over your data. That’s why we made Waypost. It’s free to use and self-hosted so your data never leaves your hands!
How does Waypost work?
Waypost consists of 3 main parts: a full-stack feature flag management application (which we will refer to as the manager app), the Flag Provider service, and SDK(s) which are inserted into your own application.
The manager app has three components. Waypost-UI is a React.js application that developers can use to create feature flags and configure them, set up and view the results of A/B tests, view logs of changes to feature flags, and more. Waypost’s back-end is an Express.js application that handles several API endpoints and makes updates to the PostgreSQL database (Waypost-DB). Waypost-DB stores all the flag information as well as the high-level A/B testing data like metrics, experiment exposures, and experiment results.
To obtain the results of the A/B tests, Waypost queries your database in which your event data is stored (which we call the Events DB). Waypost then analyzes this data using statistical tests such as the t-test or the chi-squared test, and stores the results in the Waypost-DB to be displayed in the UI.
The SDK will be imported into your app (either on the client-side, server-side, or both), and contains the logic to serve different versions of code based on various factors. The SDK receives feature flag data from the Flag Provider service via SSE (Server-Sent Events), and the Flag Provider service receives updates from the main feature flag management app via webhooks.