Admin Guide

The Forem application contains a rudimentary administration dashboard that lives behind the admin route.

The admin dashboard is made up of a series of views that range from administration tools to simplified reports. These tools are used by users with the admin or super_admin roles to administrate the Forem application.

Authorization for these tools is handled by the Rolify gem.

Currently, a workaround exists to give access to certain admin views via Rolify by assigning the role single_resource_admin to a user.

single_resource_admin users are given access to a Ruby class. In the codebase, there are admin models, not backed by database tables, that exist for this purpose. For example, if you needed to give a user access to only /admin/apps/welcome, you'd run the following command in the Rails console:

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user = User.find(some_user_id)
user.add_role(:single_resource_admin, Welcome)

This gives the user administration privileges on the controller associated with an almost empty Rails model that lives in app/models/admin/welcome.rb:

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class Welcome < ApplicationRecord
  resourcify
  # This class exists to take advantage of Rolify for limiting authorization
  # on admin reports.
  # NOTE: It is not backed by a database table and should not be expected to
  # function like a traditional Rails model
end

Now that user will be able to access the view at admin/welcome. The same workaround has been implemented for most of the admin views.