Administrate VS rspec-rails

thoughtbot/administrate is a well-known framework for administrative screen, but it's not developer friendly。I implement my own template files for Administrate, so when new Administrate version released, It is hard to update Administrate because template file is changed.**

I work at thoughtbot, you might know us for our open source work like administrate, factory_bot or shoulda-matchers.

This looks very similar to Administrate by thoughtbot https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

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.

We have already covered many use cases for customisation, everything else can be found in the official documentation.

Administrate

I usually tend to create these from Scratch, but moving forward I’ve started to use thoughtbot’s administrate gem. It sticks to the Rails conventions of controllers and routing, so it’s easy to customise and add new functionality to.

That's exactly what we do. Easy to extend trials as needed for users when needed too via https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate

Documentation https://administrate-demo.herokuapp.com/

When starting a Rails project, you have a lot of decisions to make. Whether or not to write tests should not be one of them. The big decision is to use Minitest or Rspec. Both of those testing frameworks are great and provide everything you need to test a Rails application thoroughly.

RSpec

rspec-rails factory_bot_rails faker

Ruby testing with RSpec

After all requests have been added, we need to cover them using request specs to ensure that everything will work as expected in the future as well. To add specs, we will use the rspec-rails gem. Our plan is to cover the 4 HTTP request methods that have been added above:

as a beginner you can skip it, just focus on understanding Rails' philosophy and getting comfortable with it. However, make sure you remember to come back to unit testing later bc it's a mandatory skill for a Rails developer. Unit test can help you understand your project's specs thoroughly (assume its test coverage is more than 90%). I recommend learning RSpec instead of Rails' built-in testing tool (the one being used in the Rails tutorial iirc)

RSpec is a testing framework for Ruby that is widely used in the Ruby on Rails community. It allows developers to write and execute automated tests. RSpec promotes behavior-driven development (BDD) by providing a readable syntax for describing the expected behavior of the application.

This is where rswag comes in. It is an extension to rspec-rails for "describing and testing API operations".