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.

Add Administrate to your Gemfile:

# Gemfile
gem "administrate", "~> 0.4.0"

Re-bundle, then run the installer:

$ rails generate administrate:install

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

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/)

Contributing Guidelines

Use the following guides for getting things done, programming well, and programming in style.

• Protocol
• Best Practices
• Style