Check if request is made from WordPress backend

It is not so easy to check if a request was made from the backend or not. This post shows my solution for that, which I build recently.

The problem with is_admin()

The plugin Lazy Loading Responsive Images needs to check if a request was made in the backend, to modify only image markup at the front end. The function is_admin() checks if a backend page was called โ€“ this was the first solution used in the plugin.

But then a user came across a problem with that: the function returns true for AJAX requests because they use the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php. That means the lazy loading plugin did not work for front end content which is added via AJAX because is_admin() returns true.

The solution

With that in mind, the solution has to check for AJAX requests somewhere. The first try of a function to replace the is_admin() calls looked like the following (kindly directly supplied by the user zitrusblau with the issue report):

<?php function is_admin_request() { if ( function_exists( 'wp_doing_ajax' ) ) { return is_admin() && ! wp_doing_ajax(); } else { return is_admin() && ! ( defined( 'DOING_AJAX' ) && DOING_AJAX ); } }
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

That worked for the front end, but the same user later found a new issue with that: the plugin now lazy loads the post thumbnail feature in the backend. With that, a newly chosen featured image did not show up in the meta box directly, but only after saving the post.

This is the current solution:

<?php /** * Check if this is a request at the backend. * * @return bool true if is admin request, otherwise false. */ function is_admin_request() { /** * Get current URL. * * @link https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/126534 */ $current_url = home_url( add_query_arg( null, null ) ); /** * Get admin URL and referrer. * * @link https://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/4.8/src/wp-includes/pluggable.php#L1076 */ $admin_url = strtolower( admin_url() ); $referrer = strtolower( wp_get_referer() ); /** * Check if this is a admin request. If true, it * could also be a AJAX request from the frontend. */ if ( 0 === strpos( $current_url, $admin_url ) ) { /** * Check if the user comes from a admin page. */ if ( 0 === strpos( $referrer, $admin_url ) ) { return true; } else { /** * Check for AJAX requests. * * @link https://gist.github.com/zitrusblau/58124d4b2c56d06b070573a99f33b9ed#file-lazy-load-responsive-images-php-L193 */ if ( function_exists( 'wp_doing_ajax' ) ) { return ! wp_doing_ajax(); } else { return ! ( defined( 'DOING_AJAX' ) && DOING_AJAX ); } } } else { return false; } }
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

If you know a better solution, please share it with me ๐Ÿ™‚

3 reactions on ยปCheck if request is made from WordPress backendยซ

  1. Thank you for your snippet ๐Ÿ™‚

    It seems that when you edit a post and click "Update" or "Save" it's not detected as an admin's action if you are inside `rest_pre_dispatch` hook (I think inside every hook before `init`)

    In my case I've added before your first `if` these lines

    ```PHP
    $requestFromBackend = is_rest() && strpos($admin_url, '/wp-admin/') > 0 && !strpos($admin_url, '/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php');

    if($requestFromBackend) {
    return true;
    }
    ```

    and add this function
    ```PHP
    function is_rest() {
    $prefix = rest_get_url_prefix( );
    if (defined('REST_REQUEST') && REST_REQUEST // (#1)
    || isset($_GET['rest_route']) // (#2)
    && strpos( trim( $_GET['rest_route'], '\\/' ), $prefix , 0 ) === 0)
    return true;
    // (#3)
    global $wp_rewrite;
    if ($wp_rewrite === null) $wp_rewrite = new WP_Rewrite();

    // (#4)
    $rest_url = wp_parse_url( trailingslashit( rest_url( ) ) );
    $current_url = wp_parse_url( add_query_arg( array( ) ) );
    return strpos( $current_url['path'], $rest_url['path'], 0 ) === 0;
    }
    ```

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