LiveAdmin

An admin UI for Phoenix applications built on Phoenix LiveView and Ecto.

Significant features:

• First class support for multi tenant applications via Ecto's prefix option
• Persistent user "sessions"
• Overridable views, styles, and API
• Custom actions at the resource and record level, with support for dynamic inputs
• Edit (nested) embedded schemas
• i18n via Gettext

See for yourself, try out the demo app

(Required) Installation

The overriding design goal of LiveAdmin is to require as little config as possible. Its primary intended use case is an internal tool for managing application data. It should be useable out of the box for this purpose, although it supports significant optional customization. If you are already running LiveView in your application, it should only take a few minutes to expose a UI for your resources.

1. Add to your app's deps:

   {:live_admin, "~> 0.12.0"}

2. Configure module(s) to act as a LiveAdmin resource:

   defmodule MyApp.Admin.Foo do
     use LiveAdmin.Resource, schema: MyApp.Foo
   end

   Note: if your module is an Ecto schema you can omit the schema option.

3. In your Phoenix router, inside a scope configured to run LiveView (:browser if you followed the default installation), add your resources to a LiveAdmin instance:

   import LiveAdmin.Router
   
   ...
   
   scope "/" do
     pipe_through: :browser
   
     live_admin "/admin" do
       admin_resource "/foos", MyApp.Admin.Foo
       # more resources
     end
   end

4. Finally, tell LiveAdmin what Ecto repo to use to run queries in your runtime.ex:

   config :live_admin, ecto_repo: MyApp.Repo

That's it, now an admin UI for MyApp.Foo will be available at /admin/foos.

(Optional) Configuration

You may want more control over how your resources appear in the UI, or which fields are editable. If you want to customize the behavior of one or more resources, including how records are rendered or changes are validated, or to add custom behaviors, there are a variety of configuration options available. This includes component overrides if you would like to completely control every aspect of a particular resource view, like the edit form.

• actions - functions that operate on a specific record
• tasks - functions that operate on a resource as a whole
• list_with - function used to fetch records
• render_with - function used to encode field values in views
• create_with - function used to insert a record
• update_with - function used to update a record
• validate_with - function used to validate a changeset
• label_with - function used to refer to records in views
• title_with - function used to encode resource module names in views
• hidden_fields - list of fields not to show anywhere in views
• immutable_fields - list of fields not to be editable in forms
• components - override portions of the UI
• ecto_repo - module used to execute queries

For more information about how to use options, see documentation for LiveAdmin.base_configs_schema/0.

Configuration in LiveAdmin can be set at 3 different levels. From more local to more global, they are:

Resource

The second argument passed to use LiveAdmin.Resource will configure only that specific resource, in any LiveView it is used.

Extra options:

• schema - use to set the schema for the resource (default: calling module)
• preload - manually choose which associations to preload (default: all belongs_to associations)

Scope

The second argument passed to live_admin will configure defaults for all resources in the group (wrapped in a Live Session) that do not already specify the same configuration.

Extra options:

• title - title to display in nav (default: "LiveAdmin")

Application

App config can be used to set a global default to apply to all resources unless overridden in their individual config, or the LiveAdmin instance.

Extra options:

• session_store - a module implementing the LiveAdmin.Session.Store behavior, used to persist session data (default: LiveAdmin.Session.Agent)
• css_overrides - a binary or MFA identifying a function that returns CSS to be appended to app css
• gettext_backend - a module implementing the Gettext API that will be used for translations

Features

Annotated actions and tasks with extra arguments

In addition to the record or resource, respectively, functions configured to act as actions or tasks also receive the LiveAdmin.Session object. This allows them to implement varying behavior based on user-specific state (like their id or the currently selected prefix). However, they can also support an arbitrary number of extra arguments to support user specified values. LiveAdmin will prompt the user when the action or task is selected and display any function docs.

def MyModule
  use LiveAdmin.Resource,
    actions: [{__MODULE__, :my_action, 4}],
    # ...

  @doc """
  This text will be shown to the user when running the action
  """
  def my_action(record, session, extra, extra2) do
    # do something
  end
end

Multi tenancy

To enable Multi tenant support, simply implement a prefixes/0 function in your Ecto Repo module that returns a list of prefixes. A dropdown will be added to the top nav bar that will allow you to switch between tenants.

i18n

LiveAdmin wraps all static strings in the UI with Gettext calls, but currently it does not provide any locales by default. To enable i18n, implement a locales/0 function returning a list of binary locale names on your Gettext Backend module.

Unfortunately it is not currently possible to use Gettext's utilities to automatically extract the pot files so you will need to do this manually. To avoid conflicts with your own app's translations, it is recommended to use a separate Gettext backend for LiveAdmin.

Development

This repo has been configured to run the application in Docker using Compose.

The Phoenix app is running the app service, so all mix command should be run there. Examples:

• docker compose run app mix test

To run the demo app:

• docker compose up
• Navigate your preferred browser to localhost:4000

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