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TrestleAdmin/trestle
A modern, responsive admin framework for Ruby on Rails
Trestle is a DSL-driven admin framework for Rails — you define resources (tables, forms, scopes, menus) in plain Ruby and get a working CRUD admin panel. It's aimed at Rails teams who want an ActiveAdmin/RailsAdmin alternative with a cleaner, more readable configuration syntax and native Hotwire support.
The resource DSL is genuinely nice to read — the README's post-admin example shows tabs, sidebars, custom columns, and scopes defined in a single block without feeling like a config-file dialect bolted onto Ruby. It ships gemfiles for Rails 6.0 through 8.0 (including Propshaft variants), so compatibility isn't an afterthought. Turbo Streams are first-class — create/update/destroy actions have dedicated .turbo_stream.erb views, not just a Turbo Drive wrapper slapped on old UJS code. The plugin split (auth, search, tinymce, sidekiq, active_storage) keeps the core gem lean instead of bundling everything.
No built-in authentication — you're required to pull in trestle-auth or roll your own, which is one more moving part and one more gem's release cadence to track. Several plugins (active_storage, mobility, omniauth, auth-otp) live under different GitHub accounts entirely, not the TrestleAdmin org, so there's no single team guaranteeing they stay compatible across Trestle releases. Styling is Bootstrap-based and baked into the SCSS structure; reskinning to a different design system means overriding variables and partials rather than swapping a theme. It's server-rendered ERB with Stimulus controllers, so there's no path to a decoupled/headless admin API if that's what you eventually need.