Quick start

Let's get you up and running on Forest Admin in minutes!

Please be sure of your agent type and version and pick the right documentation accordingly.

This is the documentation of the forest-express-sequelize and forest-express-mongoose Node.js agents that will soon reach end-of-support.

forest-express-sequelize v9 and forest-express-mongoose v9 are replaced by @forestadmin/agent v1.

Please check your agent type and version and read on or switch to the right documentation.

Quick start

Step 1: Create an account and follow the onboarding

Go to https://app.forestadmin.com/signup, create an account and install your project.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we have used this database. Feel free to use it if you don't have one.

At the end of your onboarding, you will out-of-the-box be able to:

  • Access all your data (1)

  • Export your data (2)

  • Add a record (3)

  • View and edit a record (4)

  • Edit your UI (5)

  • Search and filter (6)

However, your business logic likely requires more features. What if you need to...

  • refund an order

  • upload new documents, accept or reject them, or ask customers to update their documents,

  • contact a customer or ask a team member to perform an action,

  • and much more?

It's possible with smart actions 👇

Step 2: Create a Smart Action

Let's say you want to let your customer support team to easily refund orders, you can quickly create a smart action.

Declare it in your /forest/orders.js file:

/forest/orders.js
const { collection } = require('forest-express-sequelize');

collection('orders', {
  actions: [{
    name: 'Refund order',
  }],
});

Then implement it according to your business logic:

const { PermissionMiddlewareCreator } = require('forest-express-sequelize');
const permissionMiddlewareCreator = new PermissionMiddlewareCreator('orders');

...

router.post('/actions/refund-order', permissionMiddlewareCreator.smartAction(), (req, res) => {
  // Add your own logic, like calling a Stripe API for instance
  res.send({ success: 'Order refunded!' });
});

...

module.exports = router;

You must make sure that all your Smart Actions routes are configured with the Smart Action middleware: permissionMiddlewareCreator.smartAction(). This is mandatory to ensure that all features built on top of Smart Actions work as expected (permissions, approval workflows,...).

Congrats! Now it's possible to refund an order!

Step 3: Deploy to Production

Now that you have a fully functional admin panel, the next logical step is to make it live, with your live (production) data. Click on Deploy to Production and follow the flow.

That's it! You are now fully operational on Forest Admin.

Next, we recommend reading about our recommended development workflow.

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