Local: Always Getting Better

I’ve been using Local for ages. Four years ago, I wrote about how I got all my WordPress sites running locally on it. I just wanted to give it another high five because it’s still here and still great. In fact, much great than it was back then.

Disclosure, Flywheel, the makers of Local, sponsor this site, but this post isn’t sponsored. I just wanted to talk about a tool I use. It’s not the only player in town. Even old school MAMP PRO is has gotten a lot better and many devs seem to like it. People that live on the command line tend to love Laravel Valet. There is another WordPress host getting in on the game here: DevKinsta.

The core of Local is still very much the same. It’s an app you run locally (Windows, Mac, or Linux) and it helps you spin up WordPress sites incredibly easily. Just a few choices and clicks and it’s going. This is particularly useful because WordPress has dependencies that make it run (PHP, MySQL, a web server, etc) and while you can absolutely do that by hand or with other tools, Local does it in a containerized way that doesn’t mess with your machine and can help you run locally with settings that are close to or entirely match your production site.

That stuff has always been true. Here are things that are new, compared to my post from four years ago!

• Sites start up nearly instantaneously. Maybe around a year or a bit more ago Local had a beta build they dubbed Local “Lightning” because it was something of a re-write that made it way faster. Now it’s just how Local works, and it’s fast as heck.
• You can easily pull and push sites to production (and/or staging) very easily. Back then, you could pull I think but not push. I still wire up my own deployment because I usually want it to be Git-based, but the pulling is awfully handy. Like, you sit down to work on a site, and first thing, you can just yank down a copy of production so you’re working with exactly what is live. That’s how I work anyway. I know that many people work other ways. You could have your local or staging environment be the source of truth and do a lot more pushing than pulling.
• Instant reload. This is refreshing for my little WordPress sites where I didn’t even bother to spin up a build process or Sass or anything. Usually, those build processes also help with live reloading, so it’s tempting to reach for them just for that, but no longer needed here. When I do need a build process, I’ll often wire up Gulp, but also CodeKit still works great and its server can proxy Local’s server just fine.
• One-click admin login. This is actually the feature that inspired me to write this post. Such a tiny quality of life thing. There is a button that says Admin. You can click that and, rather than just taking you to the login screen, it auto-logs you in as a particular admin user. SO NICE.
• There is a plugin system. My back-end friends got me on TablePlus, so I love that there is an extension that allows me to one-click open my WordPress DBs in TablePlus. There is also an image optimizer plugin, which scans the whole site for images it can make smaller. I just used that the other day because might as well.

That’s not comprehensive of course, it’s just a smattering of features that demonstrate how this product started good and keeps getting better.

Bonus: I think it’s classy how they shout out to the open source shoulders they stand on: