Styling Administrate in Rails

Intro/Scenario

This week in my Rails development journey I have been upgrading an outdated application to Rails 6. This process involved a number of tasks such as updating the app from sprockets to webpack, updating a few deprecated methods, and last of all replacing active scaffold.

For those of you who don't know active scaffold is in a sense a predecessor of Rails Administrate, like Administrate active scaffold allows you to perform typical CRUD actions on a database through a nifty user-friendly UI. Seems pretty straight forward right? Add the gem, run the install, remove the old stuff, and good to go? Yes! But….

Once I had Administrate up and running, I noticed something kind of irritating about the table, all the columns were squished up and it was hardly readable. Being a Rails and Admistrate noob I figured “I’ll just inspect the dashboard, target the specific class and override it through the application.scss.css”

Nope, that doesn't work…

“Oh, Administrate lets you generate custom layouts?”…. Nope, no CSS customization working here.

After finding nothing in the documentation I turned to every developer's favourite site Stack overflow… Use rails generate administrate:assets:stylesheets they said. “Odd they didn’t include that in the documentation I…