Link to wp-admin alongside the site URL after the dev server starts

[amitraj2203]

Why

Once the dev server is running the app shows the site's front-end URL and, directly under it, Log in with admin / password — credentials for a screen it gives no way to reach. Most of what a contributor does next happens in the admin: checking a setting, reproducing a ticket, switching a theme. Today that means editing the URL by hand.

What changes

A wp-admin link beside the site URL, in both places the URL appears — the setup checklist step and the site page — so it is there whether a contributor is still in setup or returning to a site they have used before.

The URLs are derived in a new src/renderer/site-urls.cjs rather than built at the call site. index.jsx cannot be loaded without a DOM, so a join written there is untestable; the module keeps it reachable by node --test.

Open Adminer now derives its URL from that same module. Its old inline join guarded the trailing slash with .replace(/\/$/, '/'), which swaps a trailing slash for a trailing slash and so does nothing — harmless today only because the server URL happens to always end in one. Copying that pattern for wp-admin would have duplicated it.

Not in this PR: moving Open Adminer down onto the same line as the links — that is #249, deliberately separate.

How to test this

Platforms: any.

Starting state: a site with its dev server running.

1. Create or open a site and click Start dev server.
2. Under the site name, the front-end URL now reads http://127.0.0.1:<port>/ · wp-admin.
3. Click wp-admin → opens in your browser at the WordPress login, which returns you to the dashboard after you log in with admin / password.
4. Click Open Adminer in the button row → still opens the database browser.
5. Stop the dev server → both the URL and the wp-admin link disappear together.
6. In a fresh setup, the same link appears on the wizard's Start dev server step.

What must not have happened: the link must open in your browser, not inside the app window — a link that navigates the Electron window replaces the UI with a web page and there is no way back. Open Adminer must not have broken: it was rerouted through the new module, so a wrong URL there would be a silent regression of an existing feature.

Risks and limitations

The rendered links are not covered by an automated test — no DOM test infrastructure exists in this repo, which is the tradeoff #216 chose. Two tests read index.jsx as source text to pin the wiring instead, and the visible behaviour was checked by hand against a running server.

index.jsx:2079 applies the same no-op slash guard before setServerUrl. Left alone as out of scope; noted below.

Related

Fixes #248. See also #249, which moves Open Adminer onto this row.

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Design decisions and alternatives considered

Why a module for what looks like string concatenation. The repo's convention is that renderer logic lives in a src/renderer/*.cjs module with its own test — trac-ticket.cjs is the closest precedent, also a URL builder. Inline would have been shorter and untestable.

Why the join is defensive when the base is always the same. server-runner.js builds the URL as http://127.0.0.1:${port}/, so it has always ended in a slash. The module strips and rejoins anyway, because the old code's apparent guard against the other case did nothing, and a helper that silently depends on an invariant it does not enforce is how …:8881wp-admin gets shipped later.

Why the wp-admin path keeps its trailing slash. WordPress redirects /wp-admin to /wp-admin/; asking for the canonical form skips a round trip.

Departure from the issue. #248 suggests copying the Open Adminer pattern. That pattern contains the no-op guard described above, so it was fixed and shared instead of copied — one extra hunk, outside the issue's literal scope.

Review outcome (required — see AGENTS.md)

3 [fix here] — 2 fixed, 1 deferred. Lint clean; 780 tests pass on both system Node and Electron's Node.

Ran per .github/instructions/code-review.instructions.md, with the judgement pass in a fresh context rather than the session that wrote the change.

Fixed — 🟡 tests: the regression guard could not fire. It searched index.jsx for the old .replace(/\/$/, '/') but required a space after the comma, which the repo does not write. Green while a live instance of the pattern sat in the file it read. Replaced with assertions that neither 'wp-admin nor 'adminer.php' appears as a literal in index.jsx — concatenating a path by hand was the actual bug, and a missing literal cannot be spelled differently.

Fixed — 🟡 tests: the wiring the PR adds was unasserted. The source assertions checked the label count and the Adminer call, but nothing tied the anchors' href to adminUrl. Rewriting a link as href={serverUrl + 'wp-admin'} would have kept them green while bypassing the tested module. Added an href={adminUrl( count.

Both new assertions were mutation-tested rather than assumed: bypassing adminUrl on one anchor, and deleting one link, each turn the suite red.

Deferred — 🔵 architecture: index.jsx:2079. url.replace(/\/$/,'/') before setServerUrl is the same no-op, and main.js:2403 already trims the parsed value. Pre-existing and outside this issue; left for a separate change. The test guard no longer depends on it either way.

Verified and not findings: serverUrl only ever holds http://127.0.0.1:${port}/; Open Adminer is observably unchanged; openExternal still validates through external-url.js; nothing new crosses IPC.

Also applied from the review's style notes: both links now use an aria-hidden separator, rather than one bare interpunct that a screen reader would announce.

Implementation notes

Three commits, each green on its own: the module, the call sites, then the tests. The tests read index.jsx and assert its contents, so they land last — committing them earlier would leave a red commit mid-branch.

site-urls.cjs exports siteUrl(base, path) plus adminUrl and adminerUrl. siteUrl returns '' for a missing or non-string base, so the renderer's existing serverUrl ? … : null guards keep working on the derived value instead of producing a link relative to the app itself.

Screenshots or recording

Screen.Recording.2026-08-11.at.11.07.08.AM.mov

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Adds external wp-admin links wherever a running site URL appears and centralizes site destination URL construction.

Changes:

• Adds tested helpers for wp-admin and Adminer URLs.
• Adds wp-admin links to setup and site views.
• Routes Adminer through the shared helper.

Review findings: 1 [fix here] · 0 [follow-up]

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 3 out of 3 changed files in this pull request and generated 1 comment.

File	Description
src/renderer/index.jsx	Adds wp-admin links and uses the Adminer URL helper.
src/renderer/site-urls.cjs	Defines shared site URL builders.
test/site-urls.test.cjs	Tests URL construction and renderer wiring.

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[juanmaguitar]

Thanks @amitraj2203 for your contribution.
The PR looks good to me 👍