Hey @crankycowboy and @Laura85! Thanks for joining the Local community here.
Sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with Local accessing the hosts file in Windows. We’ve definitely seen this issue come up before but it can be tricky to pinpoint because of all the software options out there. Some folks have had success by closing Local and then right clicking on the app and “Running as Administrator” such as found in this post: Uh-oh! could not update hostsfile
Have you guys tried that? Does it sound like this lines up with your experience?
@crankycowboy, you are correct that you should be able to manually update the hosts file. Basically the hosts file needs an entry to point whatever your Local site’s domain is to your own computer, so if you add an entry like this:
127.0.0.1 example.local
Save that in your hosts file (replacing example.com) and you should be able to keep moving along.