Connect to wordpress instance on private network

[garrison]

I am self-hosting a WordPress instance internally for my organization. When I enter the URL of that site into this app, I receive an error message:

Check that the site URL entered is valid

From there, I can look at the Logs, which have reference to the REST endpoint mentioned on this line:

WordPress-Android/libs/mocks/src/main/assets/mocks/mappings/self-hosted/rest_v11_connect_site_info_self-hosted.json

Line 4 in 5385671

"urlPattern": "/rest/v1.1/connect/site-info(/)?($|\\?.*)",

Specifically, it seems that the app is connecting to an endpoint at https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/connect/site-info/?url=[private site url]

This suboptimal, because

1. It discloses the location of the private site to WordPress's REST API; and
2. The site is not accessible from the public internet, so presumably the REST API returns an error message to the Android app client.

Is there a way to use this app with a privately hosted WordPress instance?

[dangermattic]

Thanks for reporting! 👍

[jkmassel]

Howdy @garrison – thanks for the report!

We agree this is suboptimal (for both the reasons you mentioned). Hitting that endpoint is a very old hack to avoid doing a bunch of site feature detection on mobile. We're working through the process of doing this properly by talking to your site directly and using the site's Link header to derive the API root. Talking to sites that are local-only is a first-class feature of this (it's actually how our integration test suite works – we run WP in a docker container and validate the API against it).

We're not yet at feature parity with the new API layer, but if you want to try activating it by going to Me > Experimental Features > Application Password log in, you should at least be able to connect to your site (even if everything might not be working yet). We'd value any feedback you might have on this!

[smolfeet]

A workaround I used: Install older version, add the site, update to 26.4
I grabbed https://github.com/wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Android/releases/download/9.7/wpandroid-9.7.apk