Adding plugins and themes

Four sources, and the last two are why this exists as a feature rather than a link to wp-admin.

From wp.org

Search and install from the directory, in the app or:

rex wp myshop.rex plugin install woocommerce --activate
rex wp myshop.rex theme install twentytwentyfive --activate
rex wp myshop.rex plugin update woocommerce

From a zip

Upload a zip in the app. Useful for premium plugins and for a build you produced yourself.

The zip path shows no item counter

Installing from wp.org shows “installing item k of N”, because WP-CLI prints a per-item header on that path. A zip install prints no such header — so rather than parking that counter at “item 1 of 2” for the whole run, the counter is not shown at all for zip jobs, and the progress bar carries it alone.

A clamped, plausible, false number is worse than no number.

From a git repository

Clone a plugin or theme straight into wp-content, and keep working on it there:

rex repo myshop.rex add https://github.com/you/your-plugin --install
rex repo myshop.rex status your-plugin
rex repo myshop.rex branches your-plugin
rex repo myshop.rex checkout your-plugin feature/thing --install
rex repo myshop.rex pull your-plugin --install

What you get beyond a plain clone:

• Branch and tag switching from the panel, with --install re-running composer or npm only when the operation actually changed a lockfile.
• PR refs — repo prs lists the remote’s pull-request head refs so you can check one out to test it. Checking one out lands you detached, because those refs carry a number and a sha and nothing else.
• A dependency check that runs nothing. repo check reports whether composer or npm dependencies are missing or stale and offers the steps; --install is what actually runs them, stopping at the first failure.
• Dev watchers. repo watch start <dir> <script> runs a package.json script — a Vite watcher, a Sass build — inside the app. They stop when the app quits.
• Private repositories over your own ssh keys. No token to paste, nothing stored.

From a folder on your disk

If the plugin already lives somewhere you like — a monorepo, a shared folder — symlink it in:

rex repo myshop.rex link ~/Projects/my-plugin

Deleting a linked asset only unlinks it

Removing a linked plugin or theme removes the symlink. Your real folder is untouched, the same guarantee linked sites give at the site level.

Why operations report themselves

Every one of these actions toasts its outcome — naming the action and the asset — rather than only updating a row.

That is not decoration. On a 26-plugin list the row you just flipped is routinely off screen, and a streamed job whose only completion signal is a glyph inside its own card looks identical to a job that never started once you have scrolled away or switched to the browser.

What it claims is bounded by what is known: an install announces its settled result, says nothing when it merely starts, and reports partial as its own outcome rather than rounding it to success or failure.