How I Refactored a Bloated Open‑Source Admin into a Lean Backend Solution

Origin

When I first started my career I thought completing backend APIs meant the job was done. After a few years I began handling front‑end tasks as well, and in every company I worked for the front‑end and back‑end were separated but the people were not, forcing continuous learning.

Insights

After three to five years I realized the importance of summarizing business logic, technical choices, improving development efficiency, and scaling from an individual to a team. Using excellent open‑source projects can save a lot of development effort.

Company Needs a Backend System

Most companies require an enterprise‑grade admin system with similar core features:

Organizational structure

Personnel management

Permission management (classic RBAC)

Log monitoring

System monitoring

Scheduled tasks

Low‑code generation

Building these from scratch is time‑consuming, so many turn to open‑source solutions such as Ruoyi, EL‑Admin, Ruoyi‑Plus, or Yudao‑Admin.

Problems with Existing Open‑Source Admins

Feature bloat: many modules are unnecessary, making the project heavy.

Outdated technology: some still rely on MyBatis XML files in 2024.

Refactor, Simplify, Upgrade, Optimize

I created a lightweight enterprise admin by dissecting and iterating on Ruoyi:

https://ruoyi.vip/

(the official Ruoyi site, credited to the original authors).

Key changes include:

Removed the Maven aggregation structure and unnecessary dependencies, simplifying the project to a single module.

Switched from MyBatis XML to MyBatis‑Plus and added Lombok, eliminating the need for manual XML mapping.

Discarded the low‑code generator and sharding features that were not required.

Removed redundant dependencies such as template engines.

Refactored front‑end code from Promise chains to async/await, reducing code size and improving readability.

Optimized UI components, removing rarely used elements.

These changes reduced project size, improved maintainability, and increased development speed.

Future Plans

Further optimizations and new modules are planned, including email tasks, payment integration, multi‑tenant support, and replacing the Quartz scheduler with a distributed job framework (e.g., xxx‑job). The project is currently deployed internally and not open‑source.