Express Admin Area

The problem

While developers tend to live in the command line that doesn't mean everyone on the team likes to. Whether this is a non-technical member of the team or even another fellow developer.

This solution

Express Admin Area is a GUI in the browser for Database Administration tasks, Database Administration Interface (DBAI), that lets you and your team manage your database right from the browser.

Feel free to checkout this example repo that has the minimum requirements to use this package.

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Inspiration
• Contributing
• Contributors
• LICENSE

Usage

Express Admin Area is extremely simple to use. All you need to do is

• Install it as a dependency: yarn add express-admin-area or npm install express-admin area

• Create a super user from the command line: yarn run express-admin-area <<full database url>> or npm run express-admin-area <<full database url>>.

• Require Express Admin Area in your project and pass it a reference to your server, database using Sequelize, and an object containing the models in your database.

connection.js

/**
 * This is our connection.js file that will handle the connection of our server
 * layer to the database layer. Using Sequelize this is not only easily achieved
 * but we can rest assured that our queries are also safe
 */
// require our .env variables
require('dotenv').config()

const Sequelize = require('sequelize')

// create a connection to our DB
const db = new Sequelize(process.env.DB_URL, { operatorAliases: false })

module.exports = db

Electronics.js

/**
 * Now that our server and database are connected we need to create some models
 */
const Sequelize = require('sequelize')

const db = require('../connection')

// define our Electronics table
const Electronics = db.define(
  'electronics',  // name of our table in the DB
  {
    name: Sequelize.STRING,  // name field with a type of string
    price: Sequelize.INTEGER  // price field with a type of integer
  }
)

module.exports = Electronics

app.js

/**
 * Lastly, after connecting our database and creating our Electronics model to store
 * information about all of our electronics, we now need to pass this information
 * to ExpressAdminArea through the "init" method from ExpressAdminArea
 */
// require our .env variables
require('dotenv').config()

// our projects dependencies: express, express-admin-area
const express = require('express')
const ExpressAdminArea = require('express-admin-area')

const db = require('./database/connection')
// be sure to require your Sequelize models
const Electronics = require('./database/models/Electronics')

const app = express()

/**
 * Call the 'init' method from ExpressAdminArea passing in: express, databaseURI,
 * and an object containing all of your apps Sequelize models that you would like
 * to interact with using ExpressAdminArea
 */
const expressAdminArea = ExpressAdminArea.init(
  express,  // pass a reference to your apps instance of express
  process.env.DB_URL,  // databaseURI to your apps database
  [{ model: Electronics }]  // array of objects containing your apps Sequelize models
)

/**
 * Tell your app you would like to "use" ExpressAdminArea as a middleware
 * This will automatically create a new route at "https://myapp.com/expressadminarea"
 * where you can sign-in and begin interacting with your database from the browser
 */
app.use(expressAdminArea)

// tell your app to create your "electronics" table in the database if it does not exist
Electronics.sync()

// give your app an open port to start accepting requests from
app.listen(3000, () => console.log('\n\nServer Online\n\n'))

Viola! Now visit https://myapp.com/expressadminarea in your browser. Log in with your superuser credentials and you should be ready to manage your database from the browser.

Inspiration

Django's admin interface

Contributing

A good explanaiton of how to contribute to Express Admin Area can be found in the Contributing.md file.

Contributors

Brandon Benefield

LICENSE

MIT