I have just started testing Local by Flywheel. So far I am favorably impressed when comparing it to the tool I now use for localhost development work. My existing tool works locally with whatever extension the domain uses. Local by Flywheel seems to work only with the .local extension.
In this post
it appears that the process of importing the exported data at the very least requires you to use the search and replace plugin to change the .local references to .com references after the new /revised files have been loaded to the live site. This seems like a procedure that would temporarily cause the site to be unavailable. Is there a cleaner way to accomplish this so that every reference to the domain name is correct when the files are imported to the live site?