Prism Demo

A Rails + ActiveAdmin demo app, themed with the active_admin_prism sidebar theme, seeded with a small "school" dataset (Subjects, Teachers, Staff, Books, Students — 50 records each) so the admin has real data to click through.

Database is SQLite, so there's nothing to install or configure to get a working database — the file lives at storage/development.sqlite3.

Requirements

• Ruby 3.2.2 (see .ruby-version)
• Node.js >= 18 (see .nvmrc — if you use nvm, run nvm use in this directory; ActiveAdmin's JS is bundled with esbuild, which requires 18+)

Setup

bundle install
npm install
bin/rails db:prepare   # creates storage/development.sqlite3 and migrates
bin/rails db:seed      # loads the demo admin user + 50 records per model

Running it

bin/dev

This starts the Rails server on port 3000 and the two asset watchers (Dart Sass for active_admin.scss, esbuild for ActiveAdmin's JS bundle), and is the easiest way to get a working /admin — the watchers build both bundles immediately on startup, then keep rebuilding if you edit app/admin/*.rb styling or the JS entry point.

app/assets/builds/ isn't checked into git (it's generated), so if you'd rather just run the plain server without watchers, build both bundles once first:

bin/rails dartsass:build
bin/rails active_admin_js:build
bin/rails server

(Don't use bin/rails assets:precompile for this — in development it also writes a public/assets manifest that then overrides Propshaft's normal live/dev asset serving until you delete it.)

Then open the admin in your browser:

https://prism-demo.onrender.com/admin

(Running locally instead? Use http://localhost:3000/admin — or just http://localhost:3000, since / now redirects straight to /admin.)

Demo login

Email	admin@example.com
Password	password

What's in the demo

• Subjects, Teachers, Staff, Books, Students — five related models under the "School" sidebar group, 50 seeded rows each (db/seeds.rb, via Faker). Re-run bin/rails db:seed any time to reset back to a clean 50-per-model dataset.
• The Prism theme's sidebar, colorized row-action icons, styled delete confirmation dialogs, and toggle-switch fields are all wired up — see active_admin_prism's INTEGRATION.md for the full feature/config reference.

Notes for hosting this elsewhere

This is a normal Rails server process (Puma) backed by SQLite — it needs somewhere that can actually run Ruby and keep a process alive (e.g. Fly.io, Render, Railway, or the bundled Kamal config for your own server). GitHub Pages only serves static files, so it can't host this app directly — there's no Rails process behind it to run migrations, serve /admin, or query the database.

Rebuilding assets manually

Only needed if you're not running bin/dev's watchers and change app/admin/*.rb-driven styles or app/javascript/admin/active_admin.js:

bin/rails dartsass:build      # app/assets/stylesheets/active_admin.scss -> app/assets/builds/active_admin.css
bin/rails active_admin_js:build  # app/javascript/admin/active_admin.js -> app/assets/builds/active_admin.js

Both also run automatically as part of bin/rails assets:precompile.