Superuser

Administration needs customization most of the time... using gems may make your life easier but the majority of them will force you to follow some specific DSL, and will add tons of things you don't even need, even the simplest one will require you to follow certain rules in order to make modifications... so why not just generate regular scaffolding with one command and make your changes whenever it's needed ?

Superuser gem will make your life simpler, and more easier, it will generate everything for you, and every file will be within your application, like it was created by you.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'superuser'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Note: This gem expect that you have a column role in your users table, which you could set to something like "admin" for admin users, if you don't yet, you can generate a migration file:

rails g migration add_role_to_users role:string

Then run that migration:

rails db:migrate

Now let's go to the details:

(1) The very first thing to do is to initialize some basic files for superuser as follows (This should be done only once):

rails g superuser:init

This will generate a bunch of view files, as well as a folder /superuser inside your app/javascript

That folder contains a javascript and css file that are specific the administration area, so we need to compile them separately from the application ones

Here is an example if you are using esbuild config file:

const context = await esbuild.context({
    entryPoints: {
        application: "./app/javascript/application.js",
        superuser: "./app/javascript/superuser/superuser.js"
    },
    outdir: "./app/assets/builds",
    bundle: true,
    // ...
    publicPath: '/assets'
});

This above configuration will generate 2 build files "superuser.js" and superuser.css", the reason for that is that in the superuser gem layout views/layouts/superuser/application.html.erb, we are calling these 2 files:

<%= stylesheet_link_tag "superuser", "data-turbo-track": "reload" %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "superuser", "data-turbo-track": "reload", defer: true %>

(2) For every resources you have, you can generate a scaffold for it...

Let's imagine you have a resource :users and you want to generate the admin scaffolding for it, just type in the command (note that the resource should be in plural):

rails g superuser users

You have another resources/table called posts? no problem just run:

rails g superuser posts

Now go to localhost:3000/superuser (NOTE: currently the /superuser url is accessible only after you generate your first resource)

To prevent others from accessing the admin area, open the file controllers/superuser/base_controller.rb and find the method "authenticated_superuser", then put your condition there.

E.g let say you have a column 'role' in your users table, the "authenticated_superuser" method may looks like the following:

def authenticated_superuser
    redirect_to root_url if !current_user || current_user.role != 'admin'
end

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/scratchoo/superuser.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.