Does Rails have anything like the django admin?

No idea if this is comparable: https://activeadmin.info/

Edit: What a long strange trip it's been. According to my old bookmarks, wycats developed a rails admin module about 10 years ago (code not available today). I discovered that he also worked on Merb, sort of a fork of Rails, and then after helping to merge that back into Rails, he helped sferik port MerbAdmin to RailsAdmin, which exists today!

https://github.com/sferik/rails_admin

I will definitely have to try Rails 5 and see what's up, it looks like I missed a lot over the years.

Just a heads up: Admin gems are only suitable for projects that are simple and stay simple. If you want to do something that's not provided by your admin gem, you'll be fighting it. I have gone through that arduous path myself multiple times, only to end up rewriting everything from scratch.

I would love to know if Django's Admin fares better in this regard.

More: http://rubyjunky.com/get-rid-of-your-admin-gem.html

I've used the Django admin in pretty much every production project I've touched. It's the bees' knees. There's some customization overhead that becomes higher than doing your own thing is you really want to make your own admin views, but at that point nobody's stopping you from making dashboards from scratch.

I came to a similar conclusion in Django. I now build my own admin interfaces.

Not built in but it's really easy to build it yourself or use a Gem like ActiveAdmin.

As someone who hasn't used RoR, can you talk about the difference in asset handling?

Rails uses an asset pipeline package called sprockets. You throw everything in a special directory and it wraps it all up and packages it nicely for you. This also gives you SASS and coffee compilation by default.

Sprockets handles minification and cache invalidation for you.

If you don't mind the opinionated approach to your javascript and stylesheets, it works fine. If you just need to sprinkle in some javascript on top of your site, it's fantastic. If you intend for your app to be javascript heavy, a lot of people rip out sprockets altogether and fallback to webpack to handle asset compilation (and I believe the newer Rails version is integrating webpack to play nicer with the rest of the framework)

I can speak from personal experience that Sprockets is a PITA if you want to use npm.

This is the same in Python, with a bunch of different options. A common one is webassets[1] which has simple integrations for django.

[1]: https://webassets.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It's also possible to use Webpack with Django easily. With working hot module reload and everything. https://github.com/owais/django-webpack-loader

For a similar experience in Django, one should better start with https://github.com/pydanny/cookiecutter-django instead of the default generated project.

> (and I believe the newer Rails version is integrating webpack to play nicer with the rest of the framework)

Yup http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2017/2/23/Rails-5-1-beta1/