Natural Resource

Natural Resource is a small but opinionated framework built ontop of some of our favourite gems. It is designed to speed up CRUD related activities whilst still maintaining sensible standards (e.g. Admin Panel, expandable principles for an API). It utilises Pundit for authorisation and Ransack for searching and filtering.

Sponsored by Terracoding.

Why?

Our common use-case for Natural Resource is in any back-end/admin-style sections of a website. Rather than go for an out-the-box solution such as ActiveAdmin, where you have a good set of defaults but a non-rails extension pattern, we decided to speed up building a default rails-based solution, where extensions and additions are straightforward and easy to understand for anyone with basic rails understanding. The codebase is small and easy to build upon, whilst enforcing authorisation out-the-box.

We found the pattern straightforward and useful, and used the experience to help in building a standardised API using the same approach (with a couple of precondition extensions to pundit returning appropriate 412 HTTP responses). We may look to open-sourcing the API extensions soon too!

It does not include the kitchen sink

To clarify this is in no way meant to become the foundation of all controllers and implementation approaches; we ourselves use the Interactor gem to implement reuseable and modular control-flow behaviours that better reflect our business logic in favour of spreading it out over callbacks and other magical behaviour. Natural Resource is a tool designed to make our lives easier and the pros and cons of its use should be considered in-context.

Getting Started

Simply install the gem

  gem 'natural_resource'

Setup the Base Policy:

rails g natural:install

Then generate controllers/policies as required:

rails g natural:resource controller_name optional_model_name

The overall codebase for NaturalResource is very small and the bulk of the functionality can be found in lib/natural_resource/controller.rb, it's all relatively simple ruby code designed to be expanded on top for any custom functionality. To understand how Pundit works I suggest visiting their repository and going through the basics.

Example controller

class TransactionController < ApplicationController
  include AdminController
  include ReportGeneration

  resource :transaction

  before_action :set_default_query_params

  private

  def set_default_query_params
    params[:q] ||= { created_at_lt: Date.tomorrow, created_at_gteq: Date.yesterday }
  end

  def report_class
    TransactionReport
  end
end

Contributing

All contributions are welcome, simply fork the project and make a Pull Request upstream.

Testing

Simply run the rspec test suite from the spec/dummy folder.

License

Licensed under the MIT license, see the separate MIT-LICENSE.txt file.