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5. Randomness

Available inall subroutines.

Returns the true numerator or denominator of the time called. For example, randombool(3,4) will return true ¾ of the time (about 75%). This is useful for situations like A/B testing where you want to serve one web page to 90% of the requests and another to 10% of the requests. This example is shown below.

Formally, randombool picks a pseudorandom value (0 ≤ r ≤ RAND_MAX). It then returns true if (RAND_MAX × numerator) > (r × denominator). This will return true when r/RAND_MAX < numerator/denominator.

This does not use secure random numbers and should not be used for cryptographic purposes.

This function is not prefixed with the std. namespace.

Example

if (randombool(1, 10)) {
  set req.http.X-ABTest = "A";
} else {
  set req.http.X-ABTest = "B";
}

Try it out

randombool is used in the following code examples. Examples apply VCL to real-world use cases and can be deployed as they are, or adapted for your own service. See the full list of code examples for more inspiration.

Click RUN on a sample below to provision a Fastly service, execute the code on Fastly, and see how the function behaves.