Local on Apple Silicon Macs

Now that Apple has started taking orders for the first Apple Silicon Macs, I’m wondering where support for these Macs stands in Local. I imagine that the basic app can work even under Rossetta 2, but also know that Local relies on PHP, nginx, and other packages, so I’m just curious where support for this new architecture of Mac is right now, and will be in a few weeks.

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Came here to learn this and about Big Sur compatibility. I’ve asked a couple of times about the latter and nothing. A reply would be appreciated even if its ‘we’re working on it.’

er… yes?

Sorry, if you can’t see that it reports Big Sur compatibility. I think there are still some issues regarding Open Site Shell as listed in the forum. I can’t be more specific as I’m not currently running Big Sur.

Big Sur and Apple Silicon are two different things, though. I kinda expected Big Sur support. But running smoothly on a new Mac architecture is a whole different thing. My question is if Local will run smoothly on M1-equiped Macs, like the newest Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

I have a M1 MacBook Air on order. I’ll certainly update this issue when I know more.

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Yeah, asking as I have a M1 Mac mini on order… Will update as well. But would love to know from the dev team or other Local support folks if they’ve tested on the DTK. For me, at least my 2013 iMac I’m upgrading from still functions, so I can use it as a secondary Mac until Local has support if needed. I just understand that with Local’s complexity Rosetta 2 may not suffice… I’d also be happy to help beta test Local for ARM-based Macs.

The team hasn’t done any testing yet on these computers – We’re in the same boat of waiting to receive the new computers from Apple.

Whenever you do get the shiny new toys, we’d love to hear what you find!

I’ll definitely try Local soon after setting up my M1 Mac, and report back here. I’m personally quite optimistic that it will work fine, between what I understand of how Rosetta 2 works and seeing that tools like PHP and MySQL are good on macOS 11/ ARM Mac according to Homebrew documentation (I use both of those separately of Local too). Is there any better place we should be reporting experience of Local on M1 Macs other than just reporting back here?

Hi,

I am also interested in knowing how it works on apple silicon.

Thanks,

Luis

Right now, the forums are probably the best place to coordinate communication, and this topic seems to be getting the most visibility.

If there are only minor things that are wrong, I’d say reply here. If there is a deeper issue, that needs more focused discussion, we can always break it apart to it’s own thread!

Me too! Keen to see what the situation is with this.

Happy to report: Just got my shiny new M1 Mac mini. Just installed and tested Local. Seems to work great! I haven’t yet moved all my sites over, nor done extensive testing, but it seems to function as designed! I’ll report more in a day or so, once things are more settled and set up on my Mac.

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I am also happy to report that the current versions of both Local and Local Beta are wonderful on the MacBook Air with an M1.

I do wish moving sites between installations was a bit simpler, but it’s clearly doable. For the record I make a zip of the local.sql file and the wp-contents folder and just drop that on the app.

The biggest annoyance is not having easy access to the site shell.

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Since Local relies on Docker and Docker currently does not work on the M1, I’d image there will be issues. Rosetta 2 also does not support virtualization.

Local does not rely on Docker or any virtualization. Local 5.x is the current version.

Well it used to, and there is still quite a bit of docs referring to docker. It used to use Docker containers for running the DB and webserver along with VirtualBox under the hood.

Yes it used to. That was Local 3.x which was last released in July 2019.

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Why not use the Export site feature?