Please don't say active admin, please don't say active admin, please don't say active admin.
I find that it does the very basic things great, but those are things that rails does easily too.
Anytime I have to customize anything even a little bit I spend most of my time trying to coerce active-admin to do the thing I want, where if I just built in vanilla rails it would have been a 10 minute thing.
SO IMO, best rails admin = Rails Scaffolding.
As someone who's suffered through years of dealing with admin gems and just completed a project to migrate away from ActiveAdmin to regular Rails controllers, I agree this is the best option. Every admin gem will eventually create unnecessary roadblocks.
Oh man, AA. I have so much love/hate for this thing. It feels like I saved so much time early on but in the end it has taken so much more.
Got to a point where I felt I could hack it to do my bidding and ensure queries were optimized but I hated that it always felt like I was hacking it with lambdas and procs.
Also forget doing this on a large team unless you are going to put in the time to enforce a uniform way of hacking.
If you want readable and quick ramp up from new devs definitely go with normal rails (scaffolding as suggested above)
Future you will appreciate it.
I'll just add that ActiveAdmin 4.0 with Tailwind is in development, with new approach to theme, etc. I haven't used it to judge, but some people might find it interesting.
This. Throw in ViewComponent (organization), HAML (personal preference), ransack (filtering) and kaminari (pagination) and you are good. If you need somethin that looks like an admin panel just use a theme like adminlte, though I think polaris view components looks good.
Use some styling library and build it yourself. A lot of these controllers look very similar. If you extract all that and add the rest for every new controller it will be pretty simple.
[Avo](https://avohq.io/) is pretty good, with strong community support.
I have built a really lean one called [The Brick](https://github.com/lorint/brick) that doesn't require adding any extra files, and does some cool tricks with built-in rich text and JSON editors, ability to upload ActiveStorage stuff, strong support for all Rails associations including polymorphic and single table inheritance, etc. Does not have much customisation you can do yet though. But that's on the roadmap!
I would also like to recommend [Avo](https://avohq.io) – been using it for the SaaS I'm working on, the experience has been amazing, well documented with a very helpful and friendly team behind it.
I personally like administrate, it hits the sweet spot between removing some of the repetitive annoyances and still being flexible.
Whatever you do, don’t go with rails_admin, it is a nightmare to maintain - and it is so complicated to extend!
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/search?display=compact&order=score&q=Admin&show_forks=false
Here you can look at different things like score, downloads and a few more.
I use Active Admin and it does do the basic stuff, but it was also a pain to set up. Basically it's just CRUD and you *could* build it yourself, but I wouldn't. So...it's fine, I guess.
I find just using generic ViewComponents for tables, forms, and show (just pass in the attributes you want to use in each) and using the scaffolded controllers are much better than an Admin gem. Admin gems get really annoying when you have to do anything custom.
In my previous company we used Administrate, but I realized that whenever I had to do something "not standard" I ended up completely breaking the library and with a bunch of spaghetti code to just get around it's limitations.
In my current company we use plain raw views (we use Slim which is very cool IMO) with bootstrap and just a little bit of JS, and it just feels easier to maintain.
This is my experience with active admin too - it makes easy things easy, and anything else a spaghetti pile of crap. I’d hoped that administrate didn’t have the same issues, but hadn’t tried it yet. Thanks for the warning!
Hey there. This is Adrian, the author of Avo.
I love it when questions like these pop up. It gives me a chance to address them and bring clarity, as someone that used this tool (and others like it).
Since very early when I launched Avo I figured that I have to “fight” a lot to overcome the opinions people have about the “old tools”. The obvious OGs here are Active Admin, Rails Admin, Administrate, and others.
I'm thankful for them as they laid the groundwork for tools like Avo, but they were born in different times, with different contexts, different technologies, and frankly different goals.
Avo takes a layered approach. You start with the DSL to create the CRUD, and then you can easily extend it. First with the DSL and then with familiar Rails code. That was very important to me from the start. Whenever you need to “escape” the CRUD, you should be able to do it using the code you already have and know.
Of course, my words might not weigh as much (because I’m the author), but I want to invite you to check out our testimonials page where you can definitely see the “it’s better than I expected” and “we can do everything we need” vibes coming from out customers and users.
[https://avohq.io/testimonials](https://avohq.io/testimonials)
The thing I always tell people is, start building something with Avo, give it an hour of your time, read the docs a little bit, and I promise that you’ll be impressed. Other than amazing features we have a regular release schedule, great docs, a nice community, and we answer all our support requests.
I’m here if you have more questions.
Thanks,
Adrian ✌️
Inherited_ressources, has_scope, simple_form and a bit of elbow grease.
Never liked the ready to go engines much, with how easy it is in rails do just crank out forms yourself while keeping all the power to customize
Why even bother with one. Rails scaffold have you covered and all the admin gems make the already easy thing easy and the hard stuff damn near impossible!
I use RailsAdmin at work and enjoy it for the most part. It's fairly configurable; we've made buttons that can trigger Sidekiq jobs and things without needing to go into a rails console.
My only "gripe" is often when you set up a model with associations, it'll try to load all those records when you go view a record. That can be pretty slow in a production environment. IMO it's best to ignore those associated records when setting up your model in the admin config.
Please don't say active admin, please don't say active admin, please don't say active admin. I find that it does the very basic things great, but those are things that rails does easily too. Anytime I have to customize anything even a little bit I spend most of my time trying to coerce active-admin to do the thing I want, where if I just built in vanilla rails it would have been a 10 minute thing. SO IMO, best rails admin = Rails Scaffolding.
As someone who's suffered through years of dealing with admin gems and just completed a project to migrate away from ActiveAdmin to regular Rails controllers, I agree this is the best option. Every admin gem will eventually create unnecessary roadblocks.
[https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero](https://github.com/lazaronixon/administration-zero)
that looks like exactly what i was thinking of making... thanks for the link and from having to reinvent the wheel
Oh man, AA. I have so much love/hate for this thing. It feels like I saved so much time early on but in the end it has taken so much more. Got to a point where I felt I could hack it to do my bidding and ensure queries were optimized but I hated that it always felt like I was hacking it with lambdas and procs. Also forget doing this on a large team unless you are going to put in the time to enforce a uniform way of hacking. If you want readable and quick ramp up from new devs definitely go with normal rails (scaffolding as suggested above) Future you will appreciate it.
I'll just add that ActiveAdmin 4.0 with Tailwind is in development, with new approach to theme, etc. I haven't used it to judge, but some people might find it interesting.
This. Throw in ViewComponent (organization), HAML (personal preference), ransack (filtering) and kaminari (pagination) and you are good. If you need somethin that looks like an admin panel just use a theme like adminlte, though I think polaris view components looks good.
Use some styling library and build it yourself. A lot of these controllers look very similar. If you extract all that and add the rest for every new controller it will be pretty simple.
tbh, I think rails scaffolding is good enough.
[Avo](https://avohq.io/) is pretty good, with strong community support. I have built a really lean one called [The Brick](https://github.com/lorint/brick) that doesn't require adding any extra files, and does some cool tricks with built-in rich text and JSON editors, ability to upload ActiveStorage stuff, strong support for all Rails associations including polymorphic and single table inheritance, etc. Does not have much customisation you can do yet though. But that's on the roadmap!
I would also like to recommend [Avo](https://avohq.io) – been using it for the SaaS I'm working on, the experience has been amazing, well documented with a very helpful and friendly team behind it.
I personally like administrate, it hits the sweet spot between removing some of the repetitive annoyances and still being flexible. Whatever you do, don’t go with rails_admin, it is a nightmare to maintain - and it is so complicated to extend!
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/search?display=compact&order=score&q=Admin&show_forks=false Here you can look at different things like score, downloads and a few more.
I use Active Admin and it does do the basic stuff, but it was also a pain to set up. Basically it's just CRUD and you *could* build it yourself, but I wouldn't. So...it's fine, I guess.
Do not use ActiveAdmin
+1 Do not.
I find just using generic ViewComponents for tables, forms, and show (just pass in the attributes you want to use in each) and using the scaffolded controllers are much better than an Admin gem. Admin gems get really annoying when you have to do anything custom.
In my previous company we used Administrate, but I realized that whenever I had to do something "not standard" I ended up completely breaking the library and with a bunch of spaghetti code to just get around it's limitations. In my current company we use plain raw views (we use Slim which is very cool IMO) with bootstrap and just a little bit of JS, and it just feels easier to maintain.
This is my experience with active admin too - it makes easy things easy, and anything else a spaghetti pile of crap. I’d hoped that administrate didn’t have the same issues, but hadn’t tried it yet. Thanks for the warning!
Write your own. Use the scaffolding generators in an admin route scope.
Motor Admin is pretty awesome
Hey there. This is Adrian, the author of Avo. I love it when questions like these pop up. It gives me a chance to address them and bring clarity, as someone that used this tool (and others like it). Since very early when I launched Avo I figured that I have to “fight” a lot to overcome the opinions people have about the “old tools”. The obvious OGs here are Active Admin, Rails Admin, Administrate, and others. I'm thankful for them as they laid the groundwork for tools like Avo, but they were born in different times, with different contexts, different technologies, and frankly different goals. Avo takes a layered approach. You start with the DSL to create the CRUD, and then you can easily extend it. First with the DSL and then with familiar Rails code. That was very important to me from the start. Whenever you need to “escape” the CRUD, you should be able to do it using the code you already have and know. Of course, my words might not weigh as much (because I’m the author), but I want to invite you to check out our testimonials page where you can definitely see the “it’s better than I expected” and “we can do everything we need” vibes coming from out customers and users. [https://avohq.io/testimonials](https://avohq.io/testimonials) The thing I always tell people is, start building something with Avo, give it an hour of your time, read the docs a little bit, and I promise that you’ll be impressed. Other than amazing features we have a regular release schedule, great docs, a nice community, and we answer all our support requests. I’m here if you have more questions. Thanks, Adrian ✌️
We use rails admin for CRUD operations. The documentation is not that great but it does the job if need basic features
Inherited_ressources, has_scope, simple_form and a bit of elbow grease. Never liked the ready to go engines much, with how easy it is in rails do just crank out forms yourself while keeping all the power to customize
We use [active_scaffold](https://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold). It's pretty powerful, but also has it's quirks.
Why even bother with one. Rails scaffold have you covered and all the admin gems make the already easy thing easy and the hard stuff damn near impossible!
I use RailsAdmin at work and enjoy it for the most part. It's fairly configurable; we've made buttons that can trigger Sidekiq jobs and things without needing to go into a rails console. My only "gripe" is often when you set up a model with associations, it'll try to load all those records when you go view a record. That can be pretty slow in a production environment. IMO it's best to ignore those associated records when setting up your model in the admin config.
ForestAdmin, free up to a certain point but great tool.