How will you change the admin dashboard URL with out symlinking?

I am curious about altering the WordPress admin dashboard URL with out utilizing a third-party plugin.

In essence, I wish to rename the wp-admin a part of URLs to one thing else, e.g. XX/secret/YY as an alternative of XX/wp-admin/YY.

Then, if customers strive accessing XX/wp-admin/YY, they obtain a 404 not discovered error. They need to solely be capable of see the admin pages from XX/secret/YY.

I’ve seen a number of sources on-line for altering the login path, however haven’t been capable of work out learn how to change how different administration pages are accessed.

wp-admin is hard-corded into core recordsdata, so I’ve tried utilizing symlinking in order that recordsdata from inside wp-admin/ can nonetheless be included by WordPress. That is what I’ve achieved up to now:

1. Added a rewrite rule to XX/.htaccess:

RewriteRule ^secret/(.*) wp-admin/$1?%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

2. Outlined these constants in XX/wp-config.php:

outline('ADMIN_DIR', 'secret');
outline('SITECOOKIEPATH', '');
outline('COOKIEPATH', '');

3. Used filters for these hooks:

add_filter('site_url', fn ($url) => str_replace('wp-admin', ADMIN_DIR, $url));
add_filter('admin_url', fn() => site_url(ADMIN_DIR));
add_filter('user_admin_url', fn() => site_url(ADMIN_DIR) . '/person');

4. Created a symlink from XX/wp-admin to XX/secret with ln -s ./wp-admin ./secret.

This ends in each XX/wp-admin/YY and XX/secret/YY being accessible. Nevertheless, including a rewrite rule to return 404 for XX/wp-admin does so for each – I’m not sure on learn how to solely disguise XX/wp-admin from customers.

I do know there could also be plugins to attain this, however I wish to discover ways to do that myself, both with Apache or WordPress alone.

Thanks prematurely!