What is ActiveAdmin?

Active Admin is a Ruby on Rails plugin for generating administration sytle interfaces. The goals of this plugin are easy-to-use for non-techical users and fast for developers.

Active Admin

How To Use ActiveAdmin

Suppose we are create Blog web application.

$> rails new blog

Add the following line to your Gemfile.

# Gemfile
gem 'activeadmin'

Run bundle install.

$> bundle install

Install ActiveAdmin.

$> rails generate active_admin:install

After installation is finished, it will create:

  1. An configuration file on config/initializers/active_admin.rb
  2. AdminUser model on app/models/admin_user.rb
  3. An directory called app/admin to configure the admin interface of our resource.
  4. Migration files.

Migrate your db and start the server.

$> rails db:migrate
$> rails server

Visit http://localhost:3000/admin and log in using:

  • Email: admin@example.com
  • Password: password

Next, for integration with our model, let’s create Post model.

$> rails g model Post title:string content:text

Create admin interface for Post model. Because we use ActiveAdmin, we don’t need to create controller for Post model. This generator will create file on app/admin/posts.rb.

$> rails generate active_admin:resource Post

Above command creates a file at app/admin/posts.rb for configuring the resource.

ActiveAdmin.register Post do
  index do
    column :title
    column :content
  end
end

Visit http://localhost:3000/admin/posts to see the result.

More information about ActiveAdmin