Introducing Pale Blue Spring Admin: auto-generated admin UI for Spring Boot

#kotlin #backend

At Pale Blue, we’ve always admired the magic of Django Admin - that moment when you define your models and instantly get a clean, intuitive interface to browse, search, and manage your data. When we transitioned our backend stack to Spring Boot , we missed that simplicity — the ability to see and interact with our data models without writing extra code or wiring up a custom UI.

So… we built it.

We’re excited to announce the release of our second open-source library: pale-blue-spring-admin

What It Does

Pale Blue Spring Admin brings an auto-generated admin interface to your Spring Boot applications - inspired by Django’s admin, but built for the Spring + Kotlin ecosystem.

Once you install the library, it auto-discovers your JPA entities and exposes them through an intuitive web interface. From there, you can:

Browse all entities in your database
View records with pagination, search, and basic sorting
Navigate relationships through linked foreign keys

Currently, the interface is read-only , but we’re already working on write operations (create, update, delete) for a future release.

Designed with simplicity in mind

One of our core goals was simplicity. We wanted developers to drop the library into their Spring Boot project, define their JPA entities as usual, and immediately get a clean, intuitive interface - no boilerplate, no manual wiring, no custom views to maintain. The admin UI is intentionally minimal, predictable, and easy to navigate, making data exploration effortless even in large projects.

Access to the admin interface must be explicitly defined, giving you full control over who can reach it and how they authenticate. In our documentation, we also provide a recommended lightweight authentication setup to help teams secure the admin area quickly, while still allowing more advanced configurations if needed.

Built in Kotlin. For Kotlin.

This project is also a milestone for us - our first backend library written entirely in Kotlin , marking our ongoing shift to Kotlin for backend development. We love the clarity and expressiveness Kotlin brings to Spring Boot projects, and we’re excited to contribute something useful back to the Kotlin and Spring communities.