I’m modifying an existing Rails app to use ActiveAdmin — one of the new generation of Rails admin consoles (aka dynamic scaffolding for your models).  I like its approach to customization, where it assumes we’ll need to. The docs are well-written and clear, but fairly thin; however, I found a number of good resources published elsewhere:

• RailsCast
• Net Tuts+ tutorial
• Setting Up Active Admin on Heroku with Rails 3.1 and Cedar
• Sample Admin Page Gist

With a little help from stackoverflow, I got it working with my existing user model.

Note: ActiveAdmin uses kaminari, instead of will_paginate. There’s some discussion of making it more compatible, but I just switched to kaminari.

add to Gemfile:

Then on the command line:

in your config/initializers/active_admin.rb you configure your devise routes, instead of these:

if you are using the default name “user” for existing Devise authentication, change to:

Then define:

You could put it into the initializer, but I put this in my ApplicationController which seemed a somewhat better place for it.

I use cucumber to test that I’ve got everything configured correctly:

Steps are defined like this

Using Warden test helpers, which I set up in features/support/env.rb