i'm create custom admin page via add_menu_page, let's imagine that my custom page has url

wp-admin/admin.php?page=settings_page

then i'm checki is_admin() function via var_dump on my settings_page and it returns true - that's OK, but when i'm wrap rest_api_init action in if is_admin() statement, like this:

if(is_admin()){
  add_action('rest_api_init',   [$this, 'myRegisterRoutesFunction']);
}

it returns me 404 - No route was found matching the URL and request method. But if i remove if statement, it works fine. Can't understand why, thanks for the advices!

i'm create custom admin page via add_menu_page, let's imagine that my custom page has url

wp-admin/admin.php?page=settings_page

then i'm checki is_admin() function via var_dump on my settings_page and it returns true - that's OK, but when i'm wrap rest_api_init action in if is_admin() statement, like this:

if(is_admin()){
  add_action('rest_api_init',   [$this, 'myRegisterRoutesFunction']);
}

it returns me 404 - No route was found matching the URL and request method. But if i remove if statement, it works fine. Can't understand why, thanks for the advices!

• wp-admin
• rest-api
• admin-menu

2 Answers 2

Essentially, you shouldn't wrap your REST route declarations inside is_admin() since Wordpress will not load them (see @DarkNueron comment).

What you can do is pass a 'permission_callback' function to the register_rest_route function. If the function returns true, the request is allowed to continue; if false, an error is returned.

So you could do:

register_rest_route('your-namespace/v1', '/options/', [
   'methods'   => 'PATCH',
   'callback'  => [__CLASS__, 'update_option'],
   'permission_callback'   => function () {
        return current_user_can('manage_options');
   }
]);

It's due to the way WP initializes the REST endpoints. It works something like this:

Someone POSTs to an endpoint, f.ex /wp-json/my/custom/endpoint. Wordpress tries to figure out if there is a route for that endpoint by calling the rest_api_init hook, and running any custom code that sets up that route.

Now check out the source for is_admin:

function is_admin() {
    if ( isset( $GLOBALS['current_screen'] ) ) {
        return $GLOBALS['current_screen']->in_admin();
    } elseif ( defined( 'WP_ADMIN' ) ) {
        return WP_ADMIN;
    }

    return false;
}

Nothing magical here, it just checks what screen you're currently on. However, there's no "screen" when a REST call comes in. So is_admin is always going to return false.

So thats what happens when you wrap your REST initialization logic with is_admin.