Apr 10 2017

Setting Up Rails 5 API Only App with ActiveAdmin(updated manual).

*You can also find my outdated post about using ActiveAdmin with Rails 5.0 beta 3.

As you may probably know rails-api gem is now shipped with rails 5 by default. It means we can create beautiful API services using rails without any doubt =)

If you missed the announcement on what’s new in Rails 5, checkout the rails 5.0.0 anounce:**

Rails is … a great companion for the new crop of client-side JavaScript or native applications that just needs the backend to speak JSON. We’ve made this even clearer now with the new –api mode. If you create a new Rails application using rails new backend –api, you’ll get a slimmed down skeleton and configuration that assumes you’ll be working with JSON, not HTML.

Generating an API application stripes down Rails a lot, disabling views, flash messages, cookies, and more more, but ActiveAdmin can still be plugged into it with a bit of tweaking. So here is the steps on how to create a new Rails-5 API application with ActiveAdmin integration:

Setting Up Rails Api

Make sure you have installed any latest stable Ruby version as 2.2.2 or newer is required by Rails 5. I usually use Ruby 2.3.4.

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  $ rvm list
    rvm rubies
        ruby-1.9.3-p551 [ x86_64 ]
        ruby-2.2.7 [ x86_64 ]
  => ruby-2.3.4 [ x86_64 ]
  *     ruby-2.4.1 [ x86_64 ]

You also need to have rails 5 installed on your machine:

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  $ rails --version
    Rails 5.0.2

if it is not, just install it using gem install rails command)

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  $ gem install rails
    Successfully installed rails-5.0.2
    Parsing documentation for rails-5.0.2
    Installing ri documentation for rails-5.0.2

    Done installing documentation for rails after 0 seconds
    1 gem installed

To start building a new Rails API project, we need to generate it by passing the --api parameter to the rails new command:

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  $ rails new new_api_app --api

Now we have a new tiny-tyne API only Rails application without tons of Front-end related stuff that is useless in case of API apps. The very next step is installing and setting up RSpec, adding tests, scaffolding resources, etc, etc, but this is out of the scope.

You may probably noted that when an app is created with the --api flag, generator did not create views but only api-related resources, e.g.:

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  $ cd ./new_api_app
  $ rails g scaffold user
    Running via Spring preloader in process 72885
          invoke  active_record
          create    db/migrate/20170410101135_create_users.rb
          create    app/models/user.rb
          invoke    test_unit
          create    test/models/user_test.rb
          create    test/fixtures/users.yml
          invoke    resource_route
          route      resources :users
          invoke    scaffold_controller
          create    app/controllers/users_controller.rb
          invoke    test_unit
          create    test/controllers/users_controller_test.rb

Adding ActiveAdmin to Rails 5 API app

Even thought Rails 5 API allows us to get rid of senseless Rails’ Front-End parts, we can easily integrate ActiveAdmin into it. We do it by making our ApplicationController to be inherited from ActionController::Base instead of ActionController::API. We will also need to include several classes to the middleware to make it working.

Let’s do it!

Prepare Rails API application.

Update your application_controller.rb file.

before:

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  class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
    # your code here
  end

after:

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  class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    # your code here
  end

I can also suggest creating a new base controller class for the API that inherits from ActionController::API to separate API and your Admin Panel - Just add a new ApiController < ActionController::API class and use it for all the API-specific logic.

Update config/application.rb file to include necessary for ActiveAdmin ActionDispatch::Flash, Rack::MethodOverride and ActionDispatch::Cookies to be able to show flash notifications and use Devise.

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  module NewApiApp
    class Application < Rails::Application
      # ...
      config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Flash
      config.middleware.use Rack::MethodOverride
      config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Cookies
      config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore
    end
  end

Note: This way your main application code is still API only with all its benefits but you will be able to use ActiveAdmin and it should work as expected.

Add ActiveAdmin and Devise to your Gemfile:

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  source 'https://rubygems.org'
  # ...
  gem 'activeadmin', github: 'activeadmin'
  gem 'devise', '> 4.x'

Update gems using bundler and run the generator.

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  $ bundle install
  $ rails g active_admin:install

Update your migrations and start rails to see the results:

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  $ rails db:migrate
  $ rails db:seed
  $ rails server

Visit http://localhost:3000/admin and log in as the default user:

User: admin@example.com Password: password

That’s it. =)

Don’t forget to isolate your admin panel from API to protect it from attacks ;)

Setting Up Rails 5 API Only App with ActiveAdmin(updated manual).

Setting Up Rails Api

Adding ActiveAdmin to Rails 5 API app

Prepare Rails API application.

Keep having a good day!