Admin Toolbar

Frontend staff toolbar for Ghost sites. It uses Preact to keep the public-facing bundle small while providing the rendering and hooks the toolbar needs.

Development

Run pnpm dev:public from the monorepo root to start the standard development environment and the Admin Toolbar watcher. To work on this package by itself, run these commands from this directory:

pnpm build    # one-off build
pnpm dev      # watch and rebuild umd/admin-toolbar.min.js
pnpm test     # build + run tests against the built bundle

How it's served

In production, the script is loaded from jsDelivr via the adminToolbar config in defaults.json, following the same CDN pattern as portal, comments-ui, and the other public apps. In development, docker/ghost-dev/Dockerfile overrides that URL to /ghost/assets/admin-toolbar/admin-toolbar.min.js, which the dev gateway serves straight off disk from this package's umd/ directory — so the watcher's output is picked up on the next request.

Release

Patch releases are automatic. When Admin Toolbar changes on main, CI publishes the next patch version to npm and clears the jsDelivr cache. Sites using that major/minor line receive the patch without a Ghost release.

For an intentional minor or major release:

1. From a clean branch, run pnpm ship and select a minor or major version
2. Merge the release commit to main
3. Wait for a public Ghost release to ship the new default version line

pnpm ship updates both the package version and Ghost's default Admin Toolbar version.

Copyright & License

Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation - Released under the MIT license.