Active Admin

Active Admin is a framework for creating administration style interfaces. It abstracts common business application patterns to make it simple for developers to implement beautiful and elegant interfaces with very little effort.

Getting Started

Active Admin is released as a Ruby Gem. The gem is to be installed within a Ruby on Rails 3 application. To install, simply add the following to your Gemfile:

  # Gemfile
  gem 'activeadmin'

If you are using Rails >= 3.1, you must also include a beta version of MetaSearch and sass-rails:

  # Gemfile in Rails >= 3.1
  gem 'activeadmin'
  gem 'sass-rails'
  gem "meta_search",    '>= 1.1.0.pre'

After updating your bundle, run the installer

  $> rails generate active_admin:install

The installer creates an initializer used for configuring defaults used by Active Admin as well as a new folder at app/admin to put all your admin configurations.

Migrate your db and start the server:

  $> rake db:migrate
  $> rails server

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

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

Voila! You’re on your brand new Active Admin dashboard.

To register your first model, run:

  $> rails generate active_admin:resource [MyModelName]

This creates a file at app/admin/my_model_names.rb for configuring the resource. Refresh your web browser to see the interface.

Next Steps

Now that you have a working Active Admin installation, learn how to customize it:

• Customize the Index Page
• Customize the New and Edit Form
• Customize the Show Page
• Customize the Resource in General