Runtime flags are the handful of platform-wide switches a Noctern super-admin can change from AdminRuntime Flags without shipping code. Before they existed, turning one of these off in production meant editing a hosting environment variable and waiting out a roughly fifteen-minute rollout β which is a long time when sign-in is broken or a card processor is misbehaving.
How they work
Every flag has three possible sources, in order:
- A stored flag β a value you set on this page. It wins over everything.
- The environment default β the environment variable named in the flag's row. This is what a flag follows when you have never touched it, so leaving a flag alone changes nothing.
- A built-in default β used when there is no stored flag and no environment variable.
The row tells you which of the three is currently in force, and, for a stored flag, who set it and when. Reset to default deletes the stored value and hands control back to the environment variable.
A change takes effect within about 30 seconds everywhere β servers re-read the flags on a short cache. There is no deploy and no restart.
Every change is written to the platform activity log with your name, the old value and the new one. Flipping one of these is never anonymous, which is the point: these are the switches you reach for in an incident, and the log is how the story gets reconstructed afterwards.
The switches
MFA enforcement β set to off to stop requiring a second factor at sign-in. Break-glass only, for a lockout. Every super-admin sign-in that happens while it is off is recorded as a security event.
Disable App Check β bypasses Firebase App Check on protected endpoints. Turn this on only when App Check itself is the thing blocking real buyers, and turn it off the moment it recovers.
Stripe Connect routing β when off, every venue settles through Noctern as merchant of record regardless of its stored payout mode, and the Connect card disappears from venue settings.
Stripe Tax β when off, checkout falls back to the in-house tax rate from platform settings instead of asking Stripe for a per-jurisdiction rate. Nothing already charged changes either way.
Pause ticket sales β stops every new charge: online checkout, the box office (card, cash and check), memberships, gift certificates and the Door POS all refuse politely with the same message. Refunds, check-in and every report keep working, so nobody is stranded at a door and nobody is stuck waiting for money back.
Maintenance (read-only) mode β blocks admin changes while reads keep working. Use it during a data migration. The Runtime Flags page stays writable no matter what, so you can always turn the mode back off.
Maintenance banner β a plain-text strip at the top of every page, public and admin alike. You can optionally schedule it with a start and end time to queue a planned window ahead of time; the editor previews exactly what people will see and tells you whether it is showing right now. Plain text only β no links and no formatting.
What runtime flags do not cover
Anything the browser reads is compiled into the JavaScript bundle when Noctern is built, so those settings are deliberately not on this page. Changing one of them still needs a deploy and a rollout. If a switch you are looking for is not listed here, that is why.
Per-venue capabilities are a different thing entirely β those live on the venue's own modules and settings, not here. Runtime flags are platform-wide by definition: every flag on this page affects every venue at once.
When you have used one
Turn it back off. A flag left on quietly β App Check bypassed, MFA relaxed, sales paused past the incident β is worse than the problem it was reached for, and the row will keep showing you that it is stored rather than following its default until somebody resets it.