Comment by petems | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petems | Hacker News Reader

Hello everyone, Motor Admin creator here

Last year I've been searching for some administration engine for my Rails side project and I was not able to find a suitable option. I hate writing a ton of custom code for internal admin/tools so I decided to write even more code to build a general-purpose, no-code Motor Admin

Motor Admin allows to convert raw data into a powerful admin panel to cover almost every operation needed for most businesses.

Features:

- CRUD out of the box with many customization options

- Custom data reports with SQL

- Business intelligence dashboards with fields and variables

- Forms builder for custom workflows to integrate with API

- Report alerts via Email or Slack

- User roles and permissions

- Audit log

- English, Spanish, Portuguese UI languages

- Works nicely on mobile screens

Motor Admin is distributed as a single executable binary - it can be easily self-hosted on Heroku or via Docker. Also, it's possible to try it locally with binaries for macOS and Ubuntu Linux.

Would be glad to receive any feedback or answer any questions regarding the project.

GitHub: https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin/

@petems do you have plans to attach a license to your component library? https://github.com/omohokcoj/view3

thanks will do, it's MIT either way.

Thanks for building this! It seems to cover most features I'd want.

The Dockerfile is simply downloading a release from GitHub. Docker Compose file is referring to an existing image on DockerHub. How can I build a Docker image for myself starting from the code?

It would be nice to see Motor Admin listed in CapRover's (open-source PaaS for self-hosting) "One Click Apps" catalog: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/

Thanks!

Regarding your question - Motor Admin Ruby/Rails code is available under: https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin - so you can dockerize this Rails app from here.

But binaries still should be a much better option - you can join https://discord.com/invite/mFFJKSTgw3 if you have any questions.

What I meant to ask is: Why is the Dockerfile that generates https://hub.docker.com/r/motoradmin/motoradmin not available in the repo? It makes it hard to verify exactly what went into the image or to dockerize on my own. I don't see any instructions for building the binary executable either.

Docker file is available in the repo: https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin/blob/master/Docke...

This simply downloads a 65MB binary executable "motor-admin-Linux-x86_64" from GitHub and does not build from the code given in the repo. There's no visibility into what the binary actually contains or how to build it on my own.

Oh got it, here is a Docker file to build rails app from source without downloading binary:

https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin/blob/08ba1e4e339a...

Will add it back to the repository in case others need it too.

Great. BTW how were you planning on updating the binaries of your project without this file?

Binaries are build with https://github.com/motor-admin/ruby-packer - they do not require docker - this repo contains all instructions in order to pack a binary.

I'm excited to try and yet can't seem to get it working.

I followed the steps to install it on MacOS from the GitHub page and I'm thinking maybe I ran the curl command from the wrong directory, as when I try to run ./motor-admin, it gives two dlyd errors:

1) "lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: ___darwin_check_fd_set_overflow"

2) "Symbol not found: ___darwin_check_fd_set_overflow"

And it shows the "Referenced from:" being my current directory, somewhere in my Documents folder, and then "Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib"

Any idea what might be causing the error?

Thanks!

It looks like the binary doesn't work on mac M1 yet.

You can try it in docker instead - also it's possible to deploy it on heroku for free.

Ahh, I think I may have the opposite problem: I'm on Mojave and I think I need a newer version of Xcode but can't update it because I'm still on Mojave :-)

I'll try it in Docker, thank you!

This looks awesome. How difficult would you estimate migrating from ActiveAdmin to Motor? (beyond CRUD stuff ideally... i.e. we have quite a bit of custom code into various actions, screens etc)

ActiveAdmin serves us well, although shows its age, and recently it feels a bit abandoned (don't want to say anything bad, it's a tremendous piece of open source and we got a ton of value from it).

There is a ruby gem for rails projects: https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails

It's hard to say how difficult it could be but some companies already migrated from activeadmin to motor admin gem for their rails projects and they claim that it was worth it :)

Thank you! we will definitely look into it. It looks very promising!

Looks awesome, are there places to contribute? I.e support for other databases/ knowledge sources like elastic search?

Thanks, it's possible to contribute into https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin-rails it's a ruby gem which powers motor admin app - support for new data sources and more data visualization options (cohort) are welcomed :)

How this compares with Retool?

Or ForestAdmin

The biggest difference is that Motor Admin has a convenient self-hosted option with a single click deploy. Self-hosted comes with many benefits like custom domain, ability to host under VPN, and faster UI due to lower network roundtrip and CORS avoidance.

Also, Motor Admin open-source version has powerful business intelligence features with custom SQL reports, BI dashboards with variables and fields, and automated email reports.

Also Motor Admin's UI is optimized on mobile and the UI is faster in general.

In terms of available features open-source, self-hosted Motor Admin could become a much better option than ForestAdmin SaaS for an admin interface.

Retool is focused more on visual builders and requires more configurations/code to set everything up via custom dashboards.

Motor Admin has a simple unified Admin UI without the need of actually building the UIs unlike in Retool WYSIWYG.

The versatility of Motor Admin can be achieved via in-app UI configurations, custom forms, reports, and dashboards.

Btw, here is a short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD4Six8ZEP8

Also, Motor Admin has a simple self-hosted deployment option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com