Is there a good admin generator for Ruby on Rails?

36
votes

My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.

For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.

I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?

12
ruby-on-railsruby
This is off-topic but there's no way to send a private message in Stack Overflow, so I'll ask here. I'm also coming from symfony and just getting started with Rails. What has your overall experience been with Rails compared to symfony? Was Rails easy to learn because symfony borrowed so many of its ideas? - Jason Swett

12 Answers

47
votes

Active Admin (http://activeadmin.info/) was released in May of 2011, and looks like it's going to become the best Rails 3 option.

features

20
votes

rails_admin appears to be the latest-n-greatest free project as of January 2011.

...best of all, there has been a lot of activity in the repository.

11
votes

Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.

5
votes

Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.

3
votes

ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :) Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)

3
votes

ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution: http://github.com/fesplugas/typus

2
votes

You have mainly two:

2
votes

ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment. It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).

Try it: http://activescaffold.com/

2
votes

Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.

1
votes

Having also tried typus, caseincms and ActiveScaffold over the weekend, I can't rave enough about admin_data. It is

  • super-quick to install (Rails 3 is the gem, Rails 2.3 is a plugin branch, no digging through trees on github),
  • unintrusive (all code is in the vendor/admin_data folder or the gem where it belongs),
  • requires no set-up and optional configuration is one block in one file in your app,
  • correctly (!) gets all model information from your model definitions (primary_key, foreign_key, relationships etc.),
  • including multiple databases, SQL Server connections via activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, and even composite primary keys, as everything is abstracted on top of ActiveRecord, if you model works, admin_data will work,
  • works great with legacy data for the above reasons,
  • uses your existing authentication solution which is called in the most wonderful DRYness in your configuration file. It maybe less flexible or pretty than other solutions, but this plugin does many thingks right for quick admin panel setup.
0
votes

The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold. 

./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2

This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.

0
votes

I can suggest you active_admin that is best

Active Admin main site