ActiveAdmin VS RailsAdmin

Same reason IDEs — when you really know them — allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config.

Also, one major thing I'm missing personally is automatically generated OpenAPI specifications + API documentation & API clients autogenerated from it. Last time I checked Go, you had to write the spec manually, which is just ridiculous — the code already has all the necessary info, and duplicating that effort is time-consuming and error-prone (the spec says one thing, the code does another). This may be out of date, but if it still isn't, it is enough to disqualify the stack completely for me.

Also, I don't think there anything similar in the Go world to these administration panels:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/contrib/admin/

https://activeadmin.info

https://nova.laravel.com

which are just fantastic for intranet projects and/or quick prototyping.

Review Deprecations: Check the UPGRADING.md guide for any deprecations or breaking changes that may affect your project.

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/

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.

- [rails_admin](https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin)

rails_admin

https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin is very popular and i find it very easy to use.

It's really helpful to have a way to track what's going on with your application in production, things like: number of user sign ups, status of user accounts, number of X new database entries etc. Out of the box dashboards like Rails Admin are great but only go so far, eventually you will want significant customizations.

I'm working on a rails project with rails_admin and multiple models. There are several people working on the backend and I want to remove the ability to edit some of the records which have a imported boolean set to true. This records should just be readable in rails_admin.

Having an admin panel in your Rails application is honestly, to me, the best thing to do when it comes to keeping track of your users and giving them permissions. Finding out how to have an admin panel though, that was tough, mainly because I wasn’t searching for the right thing. The rails_admin gem, so simple but can control so much! The installation and usage is very simple depending on what you are trying to use it on. I should probably tell you, I am using devise with the user having a boolean attribute called admin.

Check out Retool: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/1564

A wswig for internal UI/dashboards has a lot of value for companies that don't have a dedicated internal tools team.

My company had an internal tools teams at one point but it got killed because of other business priorities.

We use https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin, that still requires development time and frontend knowledge, but the framework is terrible.

https://marmelab.com/react-admin/ is much better but also required development time and frontend knowledge.