Do you have an application that needs administrative activities from specific authenticated users? active admin is what you need. Long before active admin, developers had to go through the stress of not just building applications but also user admin dashboards through which content could be added or manipulated. Some months ago, I built an eCommerce website using rails and after implementing active admin, I realized I saved up to 30% development time compared to when I did not use active admin. Simple to implement but powerful features is how I describe activeadmin. I am going to take you through a step by step explanation on how to setup activeadmin in any rails application. is an administration framework for Ruby on Rails. Opppps!! did I just use a complicated word? Nothing to be scared of, It simply means, activeadmin provides you with a fully functional administrative dashboard in your rails administration. Enough with the praises, let’s give this app an administrative dashboard. Activeadmin Step-One: Setting up a rails application Create a rails application using the rails new command in your terminal. ~$ rails activeadmin-application new Wait until the command is fully carried out. Open the application folder that gets created (activeadmin-application) in your preferred text editor. Go to the main site, make a copy of the gems activeadmin and device. If you are wondering why we need device, It is a dependency of activeadmin that is used to create and authenticate admin users. Paste the two gems in your Gemfile and run bundle install. ruby gem gem , , gem , 'activeadmin' '~> 2.6' '>= 2.6.1' 'device' '~> 0.0.0' Make sure to set a root route for the application and a controller to which the route maps to. This is to avoid routing errors after running the development server. To save time, we will not do that in this article but just to hint you a little bit, generate a controller with an action, and use the route of the action as the root route defined in your route file. In case you generated an articles controller with an index action, this is how you would define the root route. root "articles#index" Do not forget to create a view for the action to avoid missing template errors. Step-Two: Creating models For this example, we will use two models, article and comment in a many-to-one relationship. This means that an article can have many comments while a comment can only belong to an article. rails g model Article content:text rails g model Comment article:references comment:string article:references will create a many-to-one relationship between articles and comments. The above commands will create two migration files that you will have to migrate using the command rails db:migrate Include the relationships in your model files. activeadmin-application/app/models/article.rb < : class Article ApplicationRecord has_many comments end for the comment model. activeadmin-application/app/models/comment.rb < : class Comment ApplicationRecord belongs_to comment end Step-Three: setting up activeadmin Run the following command in your terminal. rails generate active_admin:install This will create a new folder called admin in your app directory and a migration file in the db/migrate folder. Migrate the database by running the command rails db:migrate Open db/seed.rb file and ensure that the following line of code is included. AdminUser.create!(email: , : , : ) Rails.env.development? 'admin@example.com' password 'password' password_confirmation 'password' if This line is responsible for creating an admin user who will use the above credentials to log in to the dashboard in the development environment. For production, remove the snippet which says Rails.env.developmen? if Seed your development database with the following command to create a user. rails db:seed Step-Four: Registering models to the admin dashboard After creating our models and setting up activeadmin, we need to register our models to the dashboard for them to display on the dashboard. In order to do this, run the command rails generate active_admin:resource[MyModelName] In our case, it will be rails generate active_admin:resource Article and rails generate active_admin:resource Comment The above commands will create two files, app/admin/article.rb and app/admin/comment.rb. Open the files and configure them as such app/admin/article.rb ActiveAdmin.register Article permit_params :content end app/admin/comment.rb ActiveAdmin.register Comment permit_params :article_id, :comment end do do Step-Five: Viewing dashboard on Browser We have setup activeadmin and registered our models, now is the time to view our work on the browser. Startup your development server by running the command rails s Open your browser and visit the URL given by your development server on the command line. By default, it is . This will open the view that the root route maps to. To access the dashboard, visit the URL and you will be prompted to enter your credentials as an admin. Remember we seeded an admin user to the database with defined credentials. If you can’t remember, visit your db/seed.rb and check this line to see your credentials. http://localhost:3000 http://localhost:3000/admin AdminUser.create!(email: , : , : ) Rails.env.development? 'admin@example.com' password 'password' password_confirmation 'password' if Enter your credentials and you should have access to the dashboard. On the navbar, you should see all your registered models, click on any one of them to view, create, update and delete resources. Thanks for making it to the end of this tutorial, I hope it helped you and added a new trick in your bag of programming tricks. Stay blessed.
