What is Adminium?

Adminium turns a database into an admin panel. You give it a connection string, it reads the schema — table names, columns, types, foreign keys, indexes, constraints — and interprets that model at runtime as a working application: list views with filters, detail pages that follow relationships, inline editing, dashboards, roles, and an audit log.

It never reads your rows to do this. Introspection is schema-only.

The three ideas worth understanding up front

1. Runtime interpretation, not code generation

Most “admin generators” emit a codebase you then own and maintain. Adminium does not. Your schema and your customizations live as configuration in Adminium’s own tables; the server reads that configuration on every request and renders accordingly.

The consequence people ask about most: there is no source code to download. When you run adminium export-zip, you get the server plus its configuration bundle — enough to stand the same instance up somewhere else, and nothing that resembles a generated app. This is deliberate, not a limitation. See Export & restore.

2. Three connections, not one

This is the model that explains most of Adminium’s behavior, and the one that trips people up if they skip it.

Connection	What it is	Who owns it
Data	Your source database — the one with your orders and customers tables.	You. Adminium connects with whatever role you give it.
Meta	Adminium’s own tables (adminium_*): users, roles, connections, snapshots, pages, audit.	Adminium. It must be able to write here.
Introspection	The schema read that produces a snapshot.	Runs over the data connection, read-only.

The data and meta connections are separate concerns that may or may not point at the same database. That choice has one hard rule:

If your data role is read-only, the meta store must live somewhere else.

Adminium enforces this at connect time rather than letting you discover it at first write. Full decision tree: Where to put the meta store.

3. Schema-only introspection, with your role as the ceiling

Adminium probes what your role can actually do (canRead / canWrite / canDDL) and adapts. Hand it a read-only role and you get a fully functional read-only app with an honest banner saying so — not a broken app that throws on save. Details per engine: PostgreSQL · MySQL · SQLite.

No database handy?

You do not need a live connection. Adminium can build the same app from a schema file — a pg_dump, a schema.prisma, a Rails schema.rb, Django models, and five other formats. See Import a schema file.

Where to go next

• Quickstart from source — run the CLI from a git checkout.
• Run with Docker — if you would rather not install Node.
• Connect your first database — what the wizard asks and why.