tfwright

LiveAdmin - Phoenix admin UI built on LiveView

After working on it for a couple of months and using it in production for most of that time, today I’ve released LiveAdmin, a LiveView based Admin UI for Phoenix apps.

Not much to say about it, it follows in the footsteps of Kaffy and ExAdmin before it to provide a pre-rolled “administrator” UI for Ecto/Phoenix apps.

The main thing that sets it apart, aside from using LiveView, is that it has native support for multi tenant applications. I built it primarily to solve my own use case and for the sake of my own curiosity and learning, but its design is also strongly informed by the intention to remain as lean and simple to configure as possible, while providing powerful escape hatches in the form of full view overrides.

Although it is solidly usable now, it is still essentially in the prototype stage, so I would advise trying it out mainly if you have time/energy for a bit of experimentation. That said, I’d really appreciate any testing/feedback and opinions about how to do things differently.

What it has now:

Basic CRUD
Schema fields autodiscovery
Search
Editable embeds
Editable belongs_to associations via search
Resource and record level operations
View overrides

Planned:

File uploads
Dedicated show view
Easy CSS overrides
Better default CSS
Form input overrides

Cheers, and thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions.

37 comments

#library #liveview #admin-tools

39 11628 37

2024-04-28 21:47:33 UTC

First Post!

TwistingTwists

is there an example repo showing it’s abilities?

Post #1

Most Liked

tfwright

Finally releasing v0.8 today

Lots of subtle and not so subtle UI changes in this release, including a revamped nav menu. But also, if you’re not a fan of the changes, the nav menu is now one of the components that is available to override

The new nav bar also contains a new link to manage the Session. LiveAdmin has had a session concept since the beginning, but until now it has been used only to store the prefix to be passed to function overrides so they would be aware of which tenant to run queries in. The new view exposes the session object, including a new metadata key, for editing/adding arbitrary data (using a new MapInput component for map fields). Since the session should be passed to any component/function overrides, you can use it to customize behavior for the current user in all sorts of ways. For example, the css_overrides config now accepts a MFA and the session will be prepended to the arguments. This means you can implement “css themes” using a function that inspects the metadata.

This session has been backed by a very simple Agent so that if you closed the window and later returned, it would remember which prefix you were using. However, due to the state being in a GenServer, this would be erased when that process ended, for example after restarting the app. 0.8 introduces a new session_store config, which allows you to provide your own module implementing the behavior for storing/loading session state. Since the init! callback receives the current conn object, you can use it to identify a logged in user and load/persist their session state to your app’s repo, for example a Postgres DB. That way, any session metadata that user has configured will be preserved even through restarts.

This was the last major feature I planned on adding before releasing 1.0, so please add any requests to the project’s GH issues if there additions you’d like to see included. Other than that future minor releases should focus on documentation, refactors and minor improvements, and bugfixes of course.

Post #19

tfwright

0.10.0 is a big one

Feature highlights:

added i18n support - use Gettext to translate LiveAdmin copy for non-English speakers, and/or use your own custom terminology in place of what I’ve chosen
added single record view (link added to menu) - no more linking to the edit view!
added an on_mount callback option to the admin_resource helper - use this to automatically add metadata to your session, which you can then use in your overrides

API changes:

The global prefix_options config has been removed in favor of a prefixes function on your Repo module
No really public API, but the route_with_params helper has changed a bit so if you are using it in component overrides you should check out changes: Refactor route helper · tfwright/live_admin@e5de5a8 · GitHub
LiveAdmin.render_field/3 has been removed. again, not really public API

…I guess that’s it. Well, it felt like a lot

Overall upgrading from 0.9.x should not be a big lift, but as usual let me know if you have trouble, and I will add more details here.

Post #28

tfwright

Just released 0.2.

Mainly consists of various minor improvements and bugfixes, but it does contain a fix for a somewhat nasty issue that can cause form views to hang, so I would recommend updating.

Post #3

Last Post!

tfwright

The long awaited… 0.12

Options validation/documentation

Mostly responsible for holding up this release. Required a complete rewrite of how options are managed internally. Goal was to clean up the supported options, make the data structures more consistent, and to add some documentation around exactly what is supported.
Action/task arguments, annotations

The most interesting addition in my opinion. It is now possible to configure actions/tasks to take an arbitrary number of extra arguments. To do this, pass an mfa with the name and the number of arguments the function expects. LiveAdmin will then launch a modal to prompt the user to enter the extra arguments before executing the function. Example from demo app: allow overriding the user’s password. Also, just adding docs to the function will also cause LiveAdmin to launch the modal with docs content instead of the default JS alert.
Async list fetching

Minor change taking advantage of async assigns recently added to LV. List view will now fetch records in the background while displaying spinner so view does not appear frozen during slow queries.

I had hoped to launch 1.0 by the 2 year mark () but I have decided to wait until I can give the UI the makeover it deserves. Speaking of which, if you have string CSS/Tailwind skills and want to volunteer to freshen up LiveAdmin’s look please DM me! I can’t offer much more than props, but expect a shoutout in the README at the very least (and if you are a LiveAdmin user with opinions about UX I would be receptive to proposed changes beyond simple styling).