petems

Hi HN!

Motor Admin gem has been developed to replace the outdated ActiveAdmin/RailsAdmin/Blazer gems in your existing or future Rails app.

Unlike other Rails admin gems, Motor Admin doesn't use DSL or any other type of customization/configuration Ruby APIs.

All adjustments in Motor Admin can be made directly in the UI via WYSIWYG interfaces.

This probably makes it the first no-code/low-code Rails open-source admin engine.

Would appreciate any feedback regarding the gem!

The tool provides a unique https endpoint to accept webhook requests. And then it retranslates them in realtime into localhost using your the node.js engine which powers VS Code extensions - node.js from VS Code grabs requests info and triggers them into localhost.

This tool could be a better alternative to Ngrok/Localtunnel to relay requests to localhost but with a convenient GUI. It's free and the source code is published on GitHub. Also it's a charityware.

You should check Motor Admin open-source tool (I'm the creator of the tool): https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin

>Auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin

Thats exactly how Motor Admin works :)

Please feel free to open issue on Github if you face some difficulties or find some bugs/errors - hopefully those issues can be easily resolved.

You're right - Motor Admin is Postgres specific (or DB specific since it works with Mysql and SQLserver as well).

Motor Admin uses PG instead of Supabase API for better performance, ease of use and enhanced features.

It has several advantages comparing to Retool like simple self-hosting option, CRUD UI out of the box, periodical data reports (aka alerts), unified UI optimized on mobile (instead of retool's more complex UI builder).

It directly connects to PostgreSQL database instance.

You can run it on AWS EC2 or on any other Ubuntu server - the app is distributed as a single executable binary - so you basically need to connect to your AWS EC2 via SSH, download the binary and run it: https://docs.getmotoradmin.com/guide/#ubuntu

Yeah, Heroku free tier would be enough to deploy and run the app.

The latest release of Motor Admin includes automatic DB schema reload feature. So now all change in Supabase schema are automatically applied to the Motor Admin panel. It means that Motor Admin now works perfectly with Supabase and can be used to build complex admin UIs for internal users.

I think the coolest thing about Rails is actually the great amount of high quality Ruby gems for Rails.

For instance, you can bootstrap a powerful Admin panel for your Rails project in no time with https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails gem.

SQL Server support has been added in the newest release.

You can learn about how to upgrade to the latest version here:

https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin/releases/tag/late...

There are many open-source no-code tools so you can gain full control over your data/application with them as well as contribute into the source code.

For instance, you can deploy an admin panel with https://www.getmotoradmin.com/ (plug) and save a lot of time on building custom internal tools.

Thanks!

It looks like the binary doesn't work on mac M1 yet.

You can try it in docker instead - also it's possible to deploy it on heroku for free.

For custom forms and actions everything should be handled on the backend API including the DB changes.

Binaries are build with https://github.com/motor-admin/ruby-packer - they do not require docker - this repo contains all instructions in order to pack a binary.

https://github.com/motor-admin/ruby-packer - had to create a fork because the upstream repo is not maintained anymore.

Thanks, proper documentation will come really soon.

All configurations are stored in motor.yml file which is automatically generated in root directory.

There might be two ways handling configurations: 1. Use git to create commits with new configurations in motor.yml and deploy/pull that git repo on the production host in order to update the configs.

2. rake motor:sync to sync configurations directly to production app host via API.

There a bit of info about configurations sync between environment here:

https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails#configurati...

It's possible to override default CRUD with custom actions/forms and so all additional data processing will be handled on the product back end API side.

So let's say to want to add user to some LDAP directory once the user is created in Motor Admin.

In order to do that you need to override the default user creation form and send data from that form to your API back end so you can handle user creation in LDAP from there: https://monosnap.com/file/3CD1qKgNoTBOhwTwzLiNJXTUNgi8yH

All those API requests are sent with JWT header - so it's possible to validate them on the back end.

Currently it's not possible to use REST backend - direct database connection is required for motor admin to build internal rest json-api on top of the database to power the admin UI.

My concern is that with REST backend it would become a much complex tool and will make it harder to build an admin panel - Retool does a good job building internal tools with visual builders and connecting APIs - but that definitively takes more time to build admin panel with it than with Motor Admin.

Thanks! Feel free to ask any questions via Github issues or in Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mFFJKSTgw3

Personally, I think that Graphql is overcomplicated and Facebook marketing efforts did a pretty good job for its adoption by developers and companies.

The example you mentioned can be easily implemented in Motor Admin via SQL queries or admin UI configurations with direct connection to the database and the performance would be probably better than it could have been with Graphsql.

There is a ruby gem for rails projects: https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails

It's hard to say how difficult it could be but some companies already migrated from activeadmin to motor admin gem for their rails projects and they claim that it was worth it :)

The question is - do you actually need to run javascript to build an admin interface for your company?

With Motor Admin you don't need to - you can achieve almost everything AppSmith/Retool does with simpler configurations using the unified motor admin UI.

Thanks that's a good point. It requires to connect to the database (postgresql or mysql) and the tool automatically build an admin UI on top of the existing data.

You can try it yourself locally on macOS, Ubuntu or in docker if you're on windows:

https://www.getmotoradmin.com/installation

Thanks, it's possible to contribute into https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails it's a ruby gem which powers motor admin app - support for new data sources and more data visualization options (cohort) are welcomed :)

thanks will do, it's MIT either way.

AppSmith is aimed more on building UIs when Motor Admin has a single unified admin UI which can be configured and extended via simple configurations without visual builders.

Due to this approach it should be much easier to build admin panels using Motor Admin.