Administrate

A framework for creating flexible, powerful admin dashboards in Rails. Try the demo.

Warning:

Administrate is still pre-1.0, and there may be occasional breaking changes to the API. Check the release notes for important updates.

What Is Administrate?

Administrate is a library for Rails apps that automatically generates admin dashboards. Administrate's admin dashboards give non-technical users clean interfaces that allow them to create, edit, search, and delete records for any model in the application.

Administrate solves the same problem as Rails Admin and ActiveAdmin, but aims to provide a better user experience for site admins, and to be easier for developers to customize.

To accomplish these goals, Administrate follows a few guiding principles:

No DSLs (domain-specific languages)
Support the simplest use cases, and let the user override defaults with standard tools such as plain Rails controllers and views.
Break up the library into core components and plugins, so each component stays small and easy to maintain.

Getting Started

Administrate supports Rails from 4.2, up to 5.0 and beyond. We support Ruby 2.4 and up.

Add Administrate to your Gemfile and re-bundle:

gem "administrate"

The included installer will create dashboards for each model in your app, complete with routes:

$ rails generate administrate:install

Restart your server, and visit http://localhost:3000/admin to see your new dashboard in action.

For more detailed instructions or to make it work with Rails API-only applications, please go through the 'Getting Started` guide.

If your apps uses Sprockets 4, you'll need to add Administrate's assets to your manifest.js file. To do this, add these two lines to the file:

//= link administrate/application.css
//= link administrate/application.js

Otherwise, your app will show you this error:

Asset `administrate/application.css` was not declared to be precompiled in production.
Declare links to your assets in `app/assets/config/manifest.js`.

For more information on why this is necessary, see https://www.schneems.com/2017/11/22/self-hosted-config-introducing-the-sprockets-manifestjs

Create Additional Dashboards

In order to create additional dashboards, pass in the resource name to the dashboard generator. A dashboard and controller will be created.

$ rails generate administrate:dashboard Foo

Documentation

To customize the appearance, behavior, and contents of the dashboard, see the guides at https://administrate-prototype.herokuapp.com. These guides are available as markdown files in the docs subdirectory of the git repository, too.

Repository Structure

This repository contains both the source code for Administrate, and a demo Rails app that uses Administrate. The demo app is hosted publicly on Heroku.

The gem's source code lives in the app and lib subdirectories.
The demo app is nested within spec/example_app.
The guides as seen at https://administrate-prototype.herokuapp.com live as markdown files in the docs subdirectory.

Rails configuration files have been changed to recognize the app in the new location, so running the server or deploying to Heroku works normally.

With this structure, developing a typical feature looks like:

Add tests in spec/
Implement a feature in administrate/
Exercise the feature using the demo rails app (spec/example_app/app/)

Front-end Architecture

This project uses:

Sass
BEM-style CSS selectors, with namespaces
Autoprefixer
SCSS-Lint, with Hound (configuration)
A variety of CSS units:
- em for typographical-related elements
- rem for lengths related to components
- px for borders, text shadows, etc.
- vw/vh for lengths that should be relational to the viewport

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

administrate was originally written by Grayson Wright and is now maintained by Nick Charlton. Many improvements and bugfixes were contributed by the open source community.

License

About thoughtbot

administrate is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc. The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

We love open source software! See our other projects or hire us to design, develop, and grow your product.

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