ActiveAdmin VS Capybara

Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails.

But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks:

1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/105sdax/whats_the_lat... for a discussion.

2. The lack of static typing meant far less IDE support. Fewer documentation tooltips, less autocompletion, etc.

3. I used to do a lot of Rails consulting. And whenever I had to drop into a codebase with more than 50,000 lines or 5 active developers, it was generally a painful slog. Too many weird Rails plugins that stopped being maintained, too much magic, too many nasty surprises while refactoring.

Basically, smaller Rails projects were an absolute delight. Larger Rails projects, though, tended to feel more like a swamp. Tools like https://activeadmin.info/ could tip the balance where applicable.

I still think that small Rails projects are fantastic, and I don't think anything since has remotely matched Rails' productivity within that niche. There's just too much mature tooling, and much of it works together seamlessly. But not too many projects want classic multi-page apps right now, and small projects often grow up to be big projects.

Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin?

At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do that, and the Active Admin is nice to have but I wouldn't say "tremendous value".

Github Link : https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin

for those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre)

Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/.

Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/?

We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our needs. For example, Avo renders forms in a 1-field-per-row layout while we wanted something more similar to the Tailwind UI Stacked form layout. Nevertheless, we found a great deal of inspiration in the Avo code and its design principles.

I second Rails. It's incredibly polished and has really good gems to speed up dev. ActiveAdmin is a great gem if you need to quickly make an admin dashboard. It was useful when I had a small consultancy.

https://activeadmin.info/

See an example: https://activeadmin.info It provides a fast way to create back office functionality.

[1] https://activeadmin.info/

Cuba takes help from a lot of other technologies to bring the best of everything. For example, the responses in Cuba are the optimized version of the Rack responses. The templates are integrated via Tilt and testing via Cutest and Capybara.

I am going to use a browser based testing tool called Playwright (But you could use Capybara, or Selenium WebDriver etc.).

Even as a much smaller team, building Heii On-Call [0] as a lightweight alerting/monitoring/on-call rotations SaaS based on Ruby on Rails has basically been a pleasure!

And as the article highlights, perhaps the key reason for smooth deployments and upgrades is that the CI testing story is so, so good: RSpec [1] plus Capybara [2] for us. That means we have decently extensive tests of just about all behavior. The few small Rails and Ruby upgrades we've done have gone quite smoothly and confidently, with usually just a few non-Rails gem dependencies needing to be manually updated as well.

The "microservices" story is where we've pulled in the Crystal programming language [3] to great effect. After dabbling with Go and Rust, we've found that Crystal is truly a breath of fresh air. Crystal powers the parts of Heii On-Call that need to be fast and low-RAM, specifically the inbound API https://api.heiioncall.com/ and the outbound HTTP(S) prober background processes. I've ported some shared utility classes from Ruby to Crystal almost completely by just copy-and-pasting ___.rb to ___.cr; porting the tests for those classes was far more onerous than porting the class code itself. (Perhaps another point of evidence toward the superiority of RoR's testing story...)

The front-end story is nice but just a bit weaker. Using Hotwire / Turbo successfully, but I have an open PR to fix a fairly obvious stale cache bug in Turbo [4] that has been sitting unloved for nearly a month, despite other users reporting the same issue. I'm hopeful that it will get merged in the next release, but definitely less active than the backend side.

For me, the key conclusion is that the excellent Ruby on Rails testing story is what enables everything to go a lot more smoothly and have such a strong foundation. I'd be curious if any GitHubbers can talk more about whether they too are using Rspec+Capybara or something else? Are there internal guidelines for test coverage?

[0] https://heiioncall.com/

[1] https://rspec.info/

[2] https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara

[3] https://crystal-lang.org/

[4] https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/895

Engineering at Aha! focuses on using and improving the Capybara test framework. We have added many helpers and additional functionality to make working with Capybara easy. Testing at mobile widths is another chance to improve our testing tooling. Here is the incremental approach that we used to add mobile testing helpers.

Since the Capybara library drives the underlying tests, Minitest also has the same syntax.

We can write component tests with any language or framework, but the most popular ones are probably Cucumber and Capybara.

The nice thing about partial templates is that templates are unit-testable with View specs (or similarly in Minitest) and the rendered output can even be verified using Capybara matchers.

To piggyback: This would be a type of browser test, so you would want to use something like Cypress (https://github.com/testdouble/cypress-rails) or Capybara (https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara). RSpec has a good integration with Capybara. Cypress is JS-based so it will require some additional config.

When you write a system test (or, as we prefer, a system spec) with Ruby on Rails, you're exercising the whole stack from the point of view of the user. So, naturally, you have to do things like make sure that certain elements are on the page and work as you expect when you click on then, type in them, and drag them around. Capybara works exceedingly well for this, giving you a lovely API for querying HTML.