1. Installation
    1. Setting up Active Admin
    2. Upgrading
    3. Gem Compatibility
  2. General Configuration
    1. Authentication
    2. Site Title Options
    3. Internationalization (I18n)
    4. Namespaces
    5. Load paths
    6. Comments
    7. Utility Navigation
  3. Working with Resources
    1. Rename the Resource
    2. Customize the Namespace
    3. Customize the Menu
    4. Scoping the queries
    5. Customizing resource retrieval
    6. Belongs To
  4. Customizing the Index Page
    1. Custom Index
    2. Index as a Block
    3. Index as Blog
    4. Index as a Grid
    5. Index as a Table
  5. Customizing the CSV format
  6. Customizing the Form
    1. Default
    2. Partials
    3. Nested Resources
    4. Datepicker
    5. Displaying Errors
  7. Customize the Show Page
  8. Sidebar Sections
  9. Custom Controller Actions
    1. Collection Actions
    2. Member Actions
    3. HTTP Verbs
    4. Rendering
    5. Action Items
    6. Modifying the Controller
  10. Index Batch Actions
    1. Provided Batch Action
    2. Creating Your Own
  11. Custom Pages
    1. Create a new Page
    2. Customize the Menu
    3. Add a Sidebar
    4. Add an Action Item
    5. Add a Page Action
  12. Decorators
    1. Example Usage
    2. Forms
  13. Arbre Components
    1. Text Node
    2. Panels
    3. Columns
    4. Table For
    5. Status tag
    6. Tabs
  14. Authorization Adapter
    1. Setting up your own AuthorizationAdapter
    2. Getting Access to the Current User
    3. Scoping Collections in Authorization Adapters
    4. Managing Access to Pages
    5. Action Types
    6. Checking for Authorization in Controllers and Views
    7. Using the CanCan Adapter
    8. Using the Pundit Adapter

Active Admin is a framework for creating administration style interfaces. It abstracts common business application patterns to make it simple for developers to implement beautiful and elegant interfaces with very little effort.

Getting Started

Active Admin is released as a Ruby Gem. The gem is to be installed within a Ruby on Rails application. To install, simply add the following to your Gemfile:

# Gemfile
gem 'activeadmin'

After updating your bundle, run the installer

rails generate active_admin:install

The installer creates an initializer used for configuring defaults used by Active Admin as well as a new folder at app/admin to put all your admin configurations.

Migrate your db and start the server:

$> rails db:migrate
$> rails server

Visit http://localhost:3000/admin and log in using:

  • User: admin@example.com
  • Password: password

Voila! You’re on your brand new Active Admin dashboard.

To register your first model, run:

$> rails generate active_admin:resource
        [MyModelName]

This creates a file at app/admin/my_model_names.rb for configuring the resource. Refresh your web browser to see the interface.

Next Steps

Now that you have a working Active Admin installation, learn how to customize it:

Copyright 2011 Greg Bell and VersaPay