- Create a client for the website so that it can resolve flags.
- Create a flag for the header design, and define its schema.
- Use the flag in the website to control the header.
- Create variants of the header.
- Force a variant for a user to test a specific variant.
- Test resolving the flag with an evaluation context.
- Anyone who wants to set up a flag and understand how to use it.
- You need to have a Confidence account.
Choose a Resolution Method That Fits Your Application
You can resolve a Confidence feature flag in two ways: by using Confidence’s managed resolver or hosting your own local resolver. Read more about the resolution options in the documentation.Create a Client
You must associate all feature flags with at least one client. A client can, for example, be a backend service or a website. Clients use flags to deliver different user experiences. To resolve flags, a client must authenticate with Confidence using client credentials.Confidence includes a default client that has the same name as your Confidence account. You can use this client, or create a more specific one for web feature flags in this quickstart.
You have now created a web client, and created the associated client
credentials. These credentials are later used to resolve the flag.
Create a Flag
Flags let Confidence control the behavior of your application. For example, use a flag to control which machine learning model serves a recommendation, the number and size of tiles on a page, or a call to action message and its position on a sign-up page. For this tutorial, create a flag that controls the color and size of a header. To create the flag, follow these steps.
In the last step, you associated the flag with a specific client. This means
only that client can resolve the
header-redesign flag. Limiting which flags are available to which
clients is valuable for several reasons. For example, it prevents exposing flags to clients that run in
uncontrolled environments such as mobile apps or server-side web apps. It also saves resources when resolving flags
in batch (for example, at app start) by restricting resolution to only the relevant flags.
Next, you define the schema of the flag. The value of a flag is not just a
single value, but rather a key-value map of properties. To avoid errors and make flags
easier to work with, Confidence requires you to define a schema for
the flag value. The schema describe the shape of the flag value, by defining
properties and their data types.
In this tutorial, your flag controls the design of a header on a website.
The design consists of color and size, so your flag needs to set two properties: color and size.
You can configure or edit your schema by opening it on the right sidebar.
Now that you defined the schema, you can create variants that have specific
values for the
color and size properties.
Create Variants
The two variants you want to create for the header redesign are black with size 14, and blue with size 16. To do that, follow these steps.Enter values for the default style
Enter
black as the value for color, and 14 as the value for size.Use the Flag
Each flag in Confidence has code snippets that show how to resolve it using the available SDKs. To view these code snippets:Select your client and credential
Select your client, like the Web client created in an earlier step, from the client dropdown list. Select the credential from the credential dropdown list.
header-redesign flag created earlier in this
guide. When resolving a flag into a value, you specify a default value. This default value applies if a user doesn’t match or
isn’t assigned by a rule. The following code sets the default value to the color green, and size 10.
Install Dependencies
You first need to install the necessary dependencies.Initialize Confidence
With dependencies installed, you can now create a Confidence provider for your platform and connect it to the OpenFeature SDK. You only need to do this once, preferably on app startup. You should configure the Confidence SDK to enable logs at all levels when first integrating, to better understand how the SDK works. After you become familiar with it, limit logging toWARN and above.
Access the Flag
You can access the flag and its values.user_id and the plan this user is on,
in this case premium.
You can use the plan field in the context to create targeted rules. For example, with this
information in the evaluation context, an A/B test can include only users on the premium plan as
its target audience.
This video gives a quick overview how targeting and evaluation contexts work in 2 minutes and 10 seconds.
If you were to run the code above you would only get the default values for the
flag. Nothing tells the client that it should return any other
value. To do so, you need to create flag variants and a rule that returns a variant.
Force a Variant For a User
To try out a variant, you can force it for a user with a specific user ID. You do this by creating an override rule on the flag. Override rules let you target specific attribute values, such as a list of user IDs. For example, you can add the identifiers of your team members so only your team can test the new experience in its early stages. To create an override rule, follow these steps.
If you re-run the code that fetches the flag value you now see that the flag
resolves to a value other than the default.
Force all Variant For 50% of Employees
You can create an override rule with a targeting audience that includes a subset of the users in that audience. For example, you can create an override rule that targets 50% of the users in the"plan": "employee" audience. This way, provided
that all employees have their plan set to employee, you can test the new experience
on a subset of your colleagues.
On the flag page
Add attribute criterion
In the audience section, click Add attribute criterion and write
plan as field name with type string and click Add.user-test-id is eligible for the
override rule, Confidence evaluates eligibility for the second rule for everyone
else. The second rule, in turn, only targets users on the employee plan.
Change the priority of the rules by dragging the rule cards
into the desired order and clicking save.
Resolve Tester
Use the Resolve tester to see if the rule you expect returns a variant. In the Resolve tester, you give an evaluation context and see which rules match and which don’t, together with the reasons why. On the page of your flag, select Test rules at the top of the list of rules. Click Add evaluation context and give the context you want to test to resolve. If you for example have created a rule that overrides the user with IDuser-test-id to the new-style variant, you can test that the rule matches by
adding the user_id field with the value user-test-id to the evaluation
context. Click Resolve to confirm that the override rule succeeds and
returns the new-style variant.
Most of the SDKs also output log messages that redirect you to the resolve tester specifically for the
flag evaluation that the SDK performed.
The link has a message with the prefix:
See resolves for <flagName> in Confidence:To share a specific test run with someone, copy the URL and send it as a link. The link directs them to the Resolve tester with all context data preserved.
Alternative: Configure Flags with AI
You can perform all the steps in this tutorial using natural language prompts with an AI assistant. Confidence provides MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers that integrate with Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code. For setup instructions, see the MCP quickstart. Once configured, here are the prompts for each step in this tutorial (note: create your client in the UI first):| Step | Example Prompt |
|---|---|
| Create a flag | Create a flag called "header-redesign" with a string property "color" and an integer property "size" |
| Add variants | Add a variant "default-style" to header-redesign with color "black" and size 14 |
| Create override rule | Create an override rule on header-redesign for user_id "user-test-id" to see "new-style" |
| Test resolution | Test resolving header-redesign for user_id "user-test-id" |

