I'm a bit of a Rails beginner, so I'm sorry if this question is easy. I'm wondering how I am supposed to modify the Rails database as a developer without letting users of the site modify data.
More information:
Let's say I am trying to create a website that lists books along with their information. I want users to be able to see these books, but not add/delete them. As a developer, I want a way to add books without using the command line (hard to edit mistakes). What's the easiest way for me to do this? Would there be any differences between the development database and a live hosted one?
I think there are a few approaches to do this.
different user roles. This technically breaks the rule of without letting users of the site modify data, but being able to differentiate between normal and admin users means you can limit who actually can add data into the database. I used cancancan as a way to authorize requests but I know there are others.
I agree doing it using the command line isn't ideal, but rails do support rake tasks. You can create a task that will handle most of the logic and all you need to do is something like
rake create_book["name here"]
This will make the process less error-prone.
Create data using rails migrations. Rails can generate the skeleton file for you, and you just ran any ActiveRecord methods. However, the main purpose of migration is to update the database schema, but they can seed the database as well. here's the example from the dcos
Would there be any differences between the development database and a live-hosted one?
Yea, they should be totally separate database instances. You don't want to have your development database be the same as the live one. This would cause major problems. Rails have a concept of environments where you can use different configurations, so you can pick and choose what database URL to use.
like #davidhu said here The best approach really is the use of authorization. If only admin can see a page to CRUD the books then you don't have to worry about normal users doing same plus it makes it easy for you as the admin to make changes or add to the collection. Add the gem (or reinvent the wheel) then Rails will take care of the rest for you.
I'm new in Ruby on Rails, I'm wondering, is there a user interface to see all the data that you have in your Active Record Models and manipulate them just like PhpMyAdmin?
Sadly no - you have to write that interface yourself... :)
There are ways to quickly scaffold up an interface for each of your models. Look at doco on rails generate scaffold for more info.
There are also gems that will automate some admin-scaffolding for you:
Look at eg ActiveAdmin
But in practice nobody keeps either of these around for long in their projects (for various reasons).
If you're new to Rails, I can highly recommend reading your way through the Rails Guides here: http://guides.rubyonrails.org It will help you level up in all the fundamental aspects of Rails :)
There are gems in rails to maintain tables in rails app:
ActiveAdmin: It provides admin panel using which you can add/update/delete any record under tables.
rails_db_info: Just and it under Gemfile and run bundle install. Go to "/rails/info/db" link, it will list all tables with schema details. Its very easy to integrate.
When I build an API to handle my classes, if I want to add data, I have to make CURL commands through the terminal. Is there a simple way to do this ? So I'm looking for a gem (or other stuff) to handle my database easily, by myself (with no access for the users)
I've already found this : https://github.com/igorkasyanchuk/rails_db
But it's only to view content, not to add some.
Thanks !
I would suggest reading the Getting Started Guide (again?) closely as this is one of the central functions of the rails framework. If you are building an application with rails, you should be able to use the rails generate command to set up scaffolds, models, controllers, etc. And when you set up models, they will be persisted to whichever database you have set up (sqlite by default) when you call save on them.
I'm currently trying to figure out how to extend the default ActiveRecord generator to use a different file path other than app/models and db/migrate. I've found the sources for the generators for models and for migrations, but I'm unsure how to extend or override them to create my own generators that can use almost all of the ActiveRecord ones' functionality.
Ideally, the generators would act exactly the same as the current ActiveRecord generators, with only the generated file path changed. And it would be nice if I didn't end up duplicating the code from the ActiveRecord source. Has anyone created a custom generator like this? Are there any examples I could look at? Thanks!
I'm sure you anticipated this response, but this seems like a very bad idea indeed! Secretly overwriting basic Rails functionality can cause all sorts of problems if someone else comes along and the standard Rails stuff doesn't work as they expected. If it's important that you are able to use this generator then you could write a new rake task, separate from the Rails one.
My current project is in Rails. Coming from a Symfony (PHP) and Django (Python) background, they both have excellent admin generators. Seems like this is missing in Rails.
For those who aren't familiar with Symfony or Django, they both allow you to specify some metadata around your models to automatically (dynamically) generate an admin interface to do the common CRUD operations. You can create an entire Intranet with only a few commands or lines of code. They have a good appearance and are extensible enough for 99% of your admin needs.
I've looked for something similar for Rails, but all of the projects either have no activity or they died long ago. Is there anything to generate an intranet/admin site for a rails app other than scaffolding?
Active Admin (http://activeadmin.info/) was released in May of 2011, and looks like it's going to become the best Rails 3 option.
rails_admin appears to be the latest-n-greatest free project as of January 2011.
...best of all, there has been a lot of activity in the repository.
Scaffolding is the normal way to create an admin backend BUT there is a project called ActiveScaffold which may solve your problem.
Here is a roundup of a few options, including more than just ActiveScaffold.
ActiveScaffold is available for Rails 2.3.x :)
Just for someonse's info who have found this question one year later like me :)
ActiveScaffold is a good solution, but if you want a more configurable and powerful tool, I think Typus is a great solution:
http://github.com/fesplugas/typus
You have mainly two:
ActiveScaffolding: the most popular but be careful with rails 2.1
Streamlined
ActiveScaffold is by far and away the most configurable/easiest to integrate/most automagic scaffolding around at the moment.
It has built in ajax support, near seamless db introspection and it even plays nicely with legacy Oracle databases (which can be a real pain in Rails).
Try it: http://activescaffold.com/
Have a look at Casein (http://www.caseincms.com/), might be what you're looking for.
Having also tried typus, caseincms and ActiveScaffold over the weekend, I can't rave enough about admin_data.
It is
super-quick to install (Rails 3 is the gem, Rails 2.3 is a plugin branch,
no digging through trees on github),
unintrusive (all code is in the vendor/admin_data folder or the gem where it belongs),
requires no set-up and optional configuration is one block in one file in your app,
correctly (!) gets all model information from your model definitions (primary_key, foreign_key, relationships etc.),
including multiple databases, SQL Server connections via activerecord-sqlserver-adapter, and even composite primary keys, as everything is abstracted on top of ActiveRecord, if you model works, admin_data will work,
works great with legacy data for the above reasons,
uses your existing authentication solution which is called in the most wonderful DRYness in your configuration file.
It maybe less flexible or pretty than other solutions, but this plugin does many thingks right for quick admin panel setup.
The most common way to create a CRUD interface is to use Scaffold.
./script/generate scaffold_resource MyModel property:type property2:type2
This command would generate a CRUD interface for the model named MyModel (singular) with two properties. Properties is what's called columns in DB lingo. So you could have name:string age:integer active:boolean etc.
I can suggest you active_admin that is best
Active Admin main site