Quickstart

This guide takes you from nothing to a live feature flag your app reads from the edge — in about five minutes. The dashboard steps are the same for every language; the last step is to drop in the SDK for your stack.

1. Create your account

Sign in at switchbox.dev with GitHub or Google. A personal workspace is created for you automatically — no setup, no credit card.

2. Create a project

A project is a container for your flags (usually one per application). On first login, create a project and give it a name like web-app.

Every new project comes with two environments — development and production — created for you. Each environment has its own SDK key and its own flag values, so a flag can be on in development and off in production.

3. Create a flag

Inside your project, open Flags and create one. A flag needs:

• A key in lowercase_snake_case — for example new_checkout. This is the string you'll reference in code, so pick something descriptive.
• A type — start with boolean (on/off). String, number, and JSON flags are covered in Flags & flag types.

Toggle the flag on in your development environment and click Save. (Switchbox uses an explicit save, not auto-save — see Creating & editing flags.)

4. Copy your SDK key

Open the Environments tab and copy the SDK key for development. It's a long opaque string, unique to that environment. The SDK uses it both to find your config on the CDN and as the credential to read it.

Keep production and development keys separate. The key is the environment — there's no other configuration to point an SDK at the right place.

5. Install the SDK and read the flag

Now pick your language and follow the three-line setup:

• Python — pip install switchbox-flags
• JavaScript — npm install switchbox-js
• React — npm install switchbox-js @switchbox/react

Each quickstart ends on the same payoff: run your app, and watch the environment's badge in the dashboard flip to Connected ✓. That's your app successfully reading its config from the edge.