RailsAdmin

RailsAdmin is a Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data.

RailsAdmin was conceived as a port of MerbAdmin to Rails 3 and implemented as a Ruby Summer of Code project by Bogdan Gaza with mentors Erik Michaels-Ober, Yehuda Katz, Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas, Luke van der Hoeven, and Rein Henrichs.

It currently offers the following functionality:

• Show database tables
• Easily update data
• Create new data
• Safely delete data
• Automatic form validation
• Search
• Authentication (via Devise)
• User action history

Screenshots

Installation

In your Gemfile, add the following dependency: gem 'devise' # Devise must be required before RailsAdmin gem 'rails_admin', :git => 'git://github.com/sferik/rails_admin.git' Run: $ bundle install And then run: $ rails generate rails_admin:install_admin This task will install RailsAdmin and Devise if you don't already have it installed. Devise is strongly recommended to protect your data from anonymous users.

Usage

Start the server: $ rails server You should now be able to administer your site at http://localhost:3000/admin

Configuration

RailsAdmin provides its out of the box administrative interface by inspecting your application's models and following some Rails conventions. For a more tailored experience, it also provides a configuration DSL which allows you to customize many aspects of the interface.

The configuration code should be placed in an initializer file, for example: config/initializers/rails_admin.rb

General

You can customize authentication by providing a custom block for RailsAdmin.authenticate_with. To disable authentication, pass an empty block:

RailsAdmin.authenticate_with {}

You can exclude models from RailsAdmin by appending those models to excluded_models:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.excluded_models << ClassName
end

Navigation

• hiding a model
• setting the model's label
• configuring the number of visible tabs

You can hide a model from the top navigation by marking its visible option as false within the model's navigation configuration section:

By using an accessor:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    navigation do
      visible = false
    end
  end
end

Or by passing the value as an argument:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    navigation do
      visible false
    end
  end
end

Or by passing a block that will be lazy evaluated each time the option is read:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    navigation do
      visible { false }
    end
  end
end

These three examples also work as a generic example of how most of the configuration options function within RailsAdmin. You can access them with option_name = value, you can pass a value as an argument option_name value, or you can pass in a block which will be evaluated each time the option is read. Notable is that boolean options' reader accessors will be appended with ? whereas the writers will not be. That is, if you want to get the Team model's visibility in navigation, you use RailsAdmin.config(Team).navigation.visible?.

Back to navigation configuration - there is also an alias method that can be used:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    hide_from_navigation
  end
end

And also a reverse alias method to make it visible again:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    show_in_navigation
  end
end

Both also accept a block:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    # Hide Team from navigation on Sundays
    hide_from_navigation do
      Time.now.wday == 0
    end
  end
end

If you need to customize the label of the model within the navigation tab, use:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    navigation do
      label "List of teams"
    end
  end
end

Remember, you can also pass the value as an argument or as a block as with the before mentioned visibility options. Besides that, the label also has a shorthand syntax:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    label_for_navigation "List of teams"
  end
end

which allows all three forms of configuration value passing as well.

You can configure the number of tabs visible in the top navigation:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.navigation.max_visible_tabs = 3
end

Links to the rest of the models will be rendered in a drop down menu next to the tabs. Even though this option is not model specific, it shares the same semantics as the earlier ones - you can also pass in a block or pass the value as an argument by omitting the equals sign.

List view

• number of items per page
• number of items per page per model
• visible fields and their order
• field's output formatting
• field's sortability
• field's column CSS class
• field's column width

You can configure the default number of rows rendered per page:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.list.default_items_per_page = 50
end

You can also configure it per model:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      items_per_page 100
    end
  end
end

By default all fields are visible, but they are not presented in any particular order. If you specifically declare fields, only defined fields will be visible and they will be presented in the order defined:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name
      field :created_at
    end
  end
end

This would show only "name" and "created at" columns in the list view.

If you need to hide fields based on some logic on runtime (for instance authorization to view field) you can pass a block for the visible option (including its hide and show accessors):

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name
      field :created_at
      field :revenue do
        visible do
          current_user.roles.include?(:accounting) # metacode
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Note that above example's authorization conditional is not runnable code, just an imaginary example. You need to provide RailsAdmin with your own authorization scheme for which you can find a guide at the end of this file.

The header of a list view column can be changed with the familiar label method:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name do
        label "Title"
      end
      field :created_at do
        label "Created on"
      end
    end
  end
end

As in the previous example this would show only columns for fields "name" and "created at" and their headers would have been renamed to "Title" and "Created on".

The field's output can be modified:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name do
        formatted_value do
          value.to_s.upcase
        end
      end
      field :created_at
    end
  end
end

This would render all the teams' names uppercased.

Fields of different date types (date, datetime, time, timestamp) have two extra options to set the time formatting:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name
      field :created_at do
        date_format :short
      end
      field :updated_at do
        strftime_format "%Y-%m-%d"
      end
    end
  end
end

This would render all the teams' "created at" dates in the short format of your application's locale and "updated at" dates in format YYYY-MM-DD. If both options are defined for a single field, strftime_format has precedence over date_format option. For more information about localizing Rails see Rails Internationalization API and Rails I18n repository.

You can make a column non-sortable by setting the sortable option to false:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name
      field :created_at do
        sortable false
      end
    end
  end
end

By default each column has a CSS class set according to field's data type. You can customize this by:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name
      field :created_at do
        column_css_class "customClass"
      end
    end
  end
end

This would render the "created at" field's header column with a CSS class named "customClassHeader" and each "created at" value with a class named "customClassRow".

By default columns' widths are calculated from certain pre-defined, data-type-specific pixel values. If you want to ensure a minimum width for a column, you can:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    list do
      field :name do
        column_width 200
      end
      field :created_at
    end
  end
end

Create and update views

• field groupings

By default RailsAdmin groups fields in the edit views (create and update views) by including all database columns and belongs to associations to "Basic info" group which is displayed on top of form. Below that are displayed all the other associations a model has, one group per association.

The configuration accessors are edit, create and update. First one is a batch accessor which configures both create and update views. For consistency, these examples only include the batch accessor edit, but if you need differing create and update views just replace edit with create or update.

Field groups can be hidden:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    edit do
      group :default do
        hide
      end
    end
  end
end

This would hide the "Basic info" group which is accessed by the symbol :default. Associations' groups can be accessed by the name of the association, such as :fans or :players. The hide method is just a shortcut for the actual visible option which was mentioned in the beginning of the navigation section.

Field groups can be renamed:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    edit do
      group :default do
        label "Team information"
      end
    end
  end
end

This would render "Team information" instead of "Basic info" as the groups label.

As in the list view, the edit views' configuration blocks can directly contain field configurations, but in edit views those configurations can also be nested within group configurations. Below examples result an equal configuration:

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    edit do
      group :default do
        label "Default group"
      end
      field :name do
        label "Title"
        group :default
      end
    end
  end
end

RailsAdmin.config do |config|
  config.model Team do
    edit do
      group :default do
        label "Default group"
        field :name do
          label "Title"
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

In fact the first examples group :default configuration is unnecessary as the default group has already initialized all fields and belongs to associations for itself.

Just like in the list view, all fields are visible by default. If you specifically declare fields, only defined fields will be visible and they will be presented in the order defined. Thus both examples would render a form with only one group (labeled "Default group") that would contain only one element (labeled "Title").

In the list view label is the text displayed in the field's column header, but in the edit views label literally means the html label element associated with field's input element.

Naturally edit views' fields also have the visible option along with hide and show accessors as the list view has.

Authorization

Rails Admin has no specific authorization requirements so you can use whichever authz framework best suits your needs.

Declarative Authorization

Declarative Authorization works well with Rails Admin. You need to hook declarative_authorization's code into Rails Admin's controllers and write appropriate authorization declarations.

You can hook declarative_authorization into Rails Admin using code like this in an initializer (e.g., config/initializers/rails_admin.rb):

require "rails_admin/application_controller"

module RailsAdmin
  class ApplicationController < ::ApplicationController
    filter_access_to :all
  end
end

By default, access to the controllers will be denied to all users, so you need to write some authz rules so that the appropriate users can get access. These rules will vary, but here's an example:

authorization do
  role :admin do
    has_permission_on :rails_admin_history, :to => :list
    has_permission_on :rails_admin_main, :to => [:index, :show, :new, :edit, :create, :update, :destroy, :list, :delete, :get_pages, :show_history]
  end
end

This will allow the :admin role to do everything, and will prevent all other roles from doing anything.

Contributing

In the spirit of free software, everyone is encouraged to help improve this project.

Here are some ways you can contribute:

• by using alpha, beta, and prerelease versions
• by reporting bugs
• by suggesting new features
• by writing or editing documentation
• by writing specifications
• by writing code (no patch is too small: fix typos, add comments, clean up inconsistent whitespace)
• by refactoring code
• by resolving issues
• by reviewing patches

Submitting an Issue

We use the GitHub issue tracker to track bugs and features. Before submitting a bug report or feature request, check to make sure it hasn't already been submitted. You can indicate support for an existing issuse by voting it up. When submitting a bug report, please include a Gist that includes a stack trace and any details that may be necessary to reproduce the bug, including your gem version, Ruby version, and operating system. Ideally, a bug report should include a pull request with failing specs.

Submitting a Pull Request

1. Fork the project.
2. Create a topic branch.
3. Implement your feature or bug fix.
4. Add documentation for your feature or bug fix.
5. Run bundle exec rake doc:yard. If your changes are not 100% documented, go back to step 4.
6. Add specs for your feature or bug fix.
7. Run bundle exec rake spec. If your changes are not 100% covered, go back to step 6.
8. Commit and push your changes.
9. Submit a pull request. Please do not include changes to the gemspec, version, or history file. (If you want to create your own version for some reason, please do so in a separate commit.)

Contact

If you have questions about contributing to RailsAdmin, please contact Erik Michaels-Ober and Bogdan Gaza.

Credits

Many thanks to:

• Everyone in the Ruby Summer of Code class of 2010
• Piotr Sarnacki for making RailsAdmin mountable
• Daniel Neighman for generalizing authentication
• Jack Dempsey for adding support for HABTM associations
• Petteri Kääpä for writing the configuration DSL
• Cameron Priest for removing an unused file
• Christian Hølmer for a few random commits
• Caio Tarifa for a new header design
• Toby Cabot for various history fixes
• and everyone who contributed to MerbAdmin.