Article summary
RailsAdmin is an open-source tool for Rails Engine that allows you to manage your data with a user-friendly interface. It’s great for building internal infrastructure because it’s something everyone in the company can use. RailsAdmin is so straightforward, you won’t even have to train users.
Here are some of the basic features of RailsAdmin:
- Display database tables
- Create new data
- Easily update data
- Safely delete data
- Automatic form validation
- Search and filtering
- Export data to CSV/JSON/XML (very handy)
- Authentication (via Devise)
- User action history
As the IT Operations Engineer at Atomic, it’s my job to make sure everyone in the company can do their jobs without worrying about the system going down. We had a different system in place, but RailsAdmin is the perfect solution to optimize everyone’s time.
It’s Easy to Use
We’re using it to give everyone access to our database so they can easily CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) any data. The visual aspect is very important because not everyone is well versed in databases.
From a visual standpoint, RailsAdmin is years ahead of what we were using:
Here’s RailsAdmin with our information:
It’s Easy to Set Up
The back-end of RailsAdmin is what makes it attractive for me to implement into our current infrastructure. We had been using a custom-built web app, but it hadn’t been kept up to date as much as it should have been. But RailsAdmin is an open-source tool with a history of regular updates, and it has a lot of support.
I’m not trained in software development, but RailsAdmin made programming the app easier. Its initial framework and support community helped a lot with getting things up and running efficiently. RailsAdmin apps are also easy to edit and containerize.
For smaller, internal apps, Rails Admin is a great choice. Compared with designing and developing a custom app from scratch, it saves a lot of time.
I’ve enjoyed the journey of implementing RailsAdmin. It is a tool that I won’t use much, day-to-day, but it will greatly benefit the rest of Atomic’s team.