Forest Admin VS RailsAdmin

Forest Admin is an admin panel solution that saves your back-end engineers time and gives your operational teams more autonomy. Our highly customizable admin panel connects to your databases and APIs to ease your operations so that you can focus more on your business and less on backend operations.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Forest Admin.

I couldn't agree more with this statement. The issue isn't that internal tool builders lack a feature to do it, I think the problem is deeper and comes from the way they are designed.

Most of them allow you to build the frontend (web or mobile here) without providing any backend code. They provide you with an integration library, whether it's connecting to a third-party SaaS or to your backend code. But that's where it ends.

With [Forest Admin](https://www.forestadmin.com), we have a completely different architecture. All the backend code is automatically generated with the UI, allowing you to be up and running in a few minutes.

This has allowed us to provide a rich development workflow environment both on the backend (the code is yours and runs on your own machine, so you can use your Git without changing your habits) and on the frontend. This gives you the ability to fork a branch from your production environment to a dev environment, make your changes, merge them on a staging before pushing to prod, etc.

This command line is heavily inspired by Git but allows you to have a dev workflow that works for collaborating with large dev teams on your admin panel. (+100 at our largest customer).

https://www.forestadmin.com https://www.gravitee.io/

I didn't have a spare node app sitting around, so I found Forest Admin. This is actually a cool product which provides the simplicity of dashboard tools like ActiveAdmin or Retool, but preserves the privacy of the data by having you self-host the backend. The backend exposes an API that is used by the frontend client, i.e. your browser, so data doesn't need to move through Forest Admin's servers. Here's a nice graphic to visualize how this works:

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of (Forest Admin)[https://www.forestadmin.com].

Wow, I'm impressed by the number of solutions out there. Back at the beginning of Forest Admin, we were alone on the market, which is generally not a good sign. But our perseverance paid off, and it was definitely worth it in the end!

Alright, so why Forest Admin? :)

Because we only focus on the admin panel use case. Not the entire internal tools world. In this way, we are able to provide a fully-featured SaaS Admin panel out of the box. No need to build it, nor with code, nor with low/no code tools.

Even if your app, internal processes and so your admin panel is specific, we have designed our solution accordingly with 2 things that are part of our DNA from the beginning:

1/ We generate all the backend code required to an admin panel. All CRUD routes, filtering & search, dashboarding, permissions, etc. Everything is automatically generated in a few seconds based on datasource introspection. In the end, the generated code is just a standard REST API, so you can extend/override it without any limitations.

2/ We pre-built the admin UI with every admin standard features available out of the box, with a big focus on providing a great UI/UX possible for operational people. We obviously also provide all the low/no code features to customize pretty much anything. We also provide a feature called "Workspace" (which is generally the core of what our competitors do) that allow users build custom views using drag'n'drop of UI components from scratch.

For home-lab/internal UIs, you can go a long way with the auto-generated model-admin pages from Django. If you just need CRUD and actions triggered on a list of models, you can typically avoid any UI work and just define a few Admin classes, and if you need to make custom forms it's quite easy using Django's templating machinery to override individual pages.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/contrib/admin/

A similar modular admin system that's more generic is https://www.forestadmin.com/, I think this one has a layout editor too. But that one requires a REST API and so it may require more plumbing, depending on what you've already built. Or it could fit nicely on top of what you already have, if you already have APIs for everything.

In this blog, we'll see how to build a CRUD app with Forest Admin. We'll assume you're building a CRUD app for a PostgreSQL database.

At Forest Admin, we build admin panels for which we need to compute and cache large JSON documents. These documents are stored in redis and retrieved from this storage in order to be as fast as possible.

At Forest Admin, we recently faced this issue to move data from a Postgresql database to ElasticSearch.

Like most things, it's probably a combination of things.

The Django Admin existed before Django publicly existed. That meant that once anyone started using Django they knew that they should constrain their use of Django in certain ways so that the Django Admin would work with their usage. Features that would be added to Django would be built with the Django Admin in mind.

Many tools like Flask or FastAPI don't have an opinionated model layer like Django. Without that, you can't really create an admin interface programatically. People could be storing their data in any sort of fashion anywhere. How would one build an admin system for something like Flask or FastAPI where there's no convention around how people set up data access? A lot of frameworks out there don't tell you "access your data in this way" or "this is how users will be authenticated." Without those two things, it's hard to really create an admin system.

There are similar systems available for some frameworks, but since they aren't part of the core framework, they don't get the same attention. Someone creates it, but it doesn't have the kind of community buy-in that sustains it. One of the odd things about Django is that the admin system is under `django.contrib` which indicated that they didn't intend for it to be in the core of Django forever, but that's not really how `django.contrib` ended up. It continued to be a core part of Django maintained as part of the framework.

Like I said, there are admin dashboards available in other frameworks like RailsAdmin (https://github.com/railsadminteam/rails_admin) or Core Admin for .NET (https://github.com/edandersen/core-admin) and I'm sure there's more. However, both Rails and .NET provide most of what Django provides (and a lot more than most frameworks). Rails and .NET both have a default data access ORM that a majority of people using those frameworks tend to use. .NET has built-in authentication/authorization so the admin can work off that. Rails doesn't have auth, but RailsAdmin uses some plugins.

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.