Is there a good admin generator for Ruby on Rails?

Question

My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.

For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.

I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?

Answer 1

Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.

Answer 2

The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold.

./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2

This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.

Answer 3

You have mainly two:

• ActiveScaffolding: the most popular but be careful with rails 2.1
• Streamlined

Answer 4

@Blaxter

I'm using Rails 2.1.1 with ActiveScaffold now with no problems at all. Granted, I'm not doing anything really difficult, but it seems to work fine. Maybe it's a Rails 2.1.0 problem?

Answer 5

scaffold_resource has been replaced by just 'scaffold', fyi

Answer 6

ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment. It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).

Try it: http://activescaffold.com/

Answer 7

Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.

Answer 8

ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :) Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)

Answer 9

ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution: http://github.com/fesplugas/typus

Answer 10

Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.