⏱ 5 min chrono FREE admin panel with ForestAdmin
Tags: database, javascript, webdev, tutorial
Published: 2020-01-17 11:15:17

> **Product guy :** Hey, could you give me access to database ?

> **Tech guy :** Hmm.. why ?

> **Product guy :** To avoid to bother you each time I need to update something

> **Tech guy :** So, you would need a BackOffice for that.

> **Product guy :** Ok, could you please develop it ?

You probably already had this discussion...
Let's imagine now that you can solve it ... in MINUTES !

# What is [ForestAdmin](https://www.forestadmin.com/) 🌲 ?

***"Forest Admin provides an off-the-shelf admin panel based on a highly-extensible API hosted on your servers."***

In other words, it's a SaaS platform providing all common admin tasks you'll need as developer if you want to create your own Back Office.

With Forest you can :

- 📝 View / Create / Edit / Delete entries of your database
- 🔐 Handle access control list
- 📈 Create awesome dashboards and views with 0 or few code lines.
- 🌍 Create custom actions that triggers your backend API
- ✨ And many more !
  
  
All of this only with configurations and few lines of Javascript 👨‍💻!

Here is an example of what it looks like out of the box :

![OutOfTheBox](https://www.forestadmin.com/public/img/illustrations-dev/screens/crud.jpg)


## Installation

1. Create your account for FREE at https://www.forestadmin.com/
2. Follow the instructions provided to connect to your database*
3. Install in local using Docker or Node.js
4. `npm start` 🚀
5. Go to http://app.forestadmin.com/projects

**For the time being, you can only connect to Mysql, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and MongoDB.*

## Deployment

You can host your server **anywhere you want** using **Docker** or **Node.js**. For example, Forest provide a tutorial to host your server on Heroku [here](https://docs.forestadmin.com/documentation/how-tos/deploy-to-production-on-heroku) (it takes really 3 minutes !)

## Customization

You have 2 categories of customization :

- **Model** : You can modify your database model, relationships and custom actions (called "smart actions") using Javascript !
- **UI** : That's the best part for developers. You can modify your UI using the GUI layout editor provided by forest admin (based on [ember.js](https://emberjs.com/)) 

Here are some examples :

![Admin panel](https://cdn0.capterra-static.com/screenshots/2119171/173448.png)

You can even develop your own UI with HTML/CSS/JS code to have custom views like this one :

![Admin panel](https://blobscdn.gitbook.com/v0/b/gitbook-28427.appspot.com/o/assets%2F-LR7SWfEwsNtj_ZiSkSA%2F-LjL7bN-8OvTSVSXbW_L%2F-LjL7dHi7khGbSTS0qYH%2Fimage.png?alt=media&token=9ddf0770-ac97-436f-b00b-958f9429801a)


## How it works ?

It's quite interesting to know how the product is made because it's atypical. Indeed, the code and model is hosted on your servers but the UI layout configuration is hosted on Forest servers. Here is a schema of the architecture :

![Architecture](https://www.forestadmin.com/public/img/illustrations-dev/schema-4.svg)

This way, your data remain secure 🔐

## Conclusion

It's been 6 months that we use Forest and the whole team is very happy with it. The product and marketing love the dashboard and custom views (you know, they love fancy graphs 😄). The customer support work is easier thanks to views displaying customer data to answer questions quickly.

Also, it's free up to 10 users so you can test it before using it in your profesional projects !

And above all, it doesn't take time to your dev team, and they can use time for "real work" ^^

Hope it helps !