Local Connect

The Local Connect feature helps you move a site between Local and your remote hosting provider (WP Engine or Flywheel).

Pulling a site down to Local allows you to quickly create a sandbox for experimenting with new ideas or testing updates to plugins and themes. Once you finish working on the site, deploying is easy by clicking the “push” button!

Throughout development, you can pull down changes to the remote site to always have the latest content. Along the way, you can push works-in-progress to a staging environment to get feedback from co-workers or clients.

Getting started with Local Connect is easy:

1. Connect Local to your hosting provider (Flywheel or WP Engine).
2. Connect a specific local site to a remote site.
3. Start pushing or pulling and select the remote environment you’d like to use!

Connect to a hosting provider

If you would like to connect to a hosting provider that is not Flywheel or WP Engine we suggest you download the plugin WP Migrate and utilize their Full-Site export feature. Here’s a doc that walks you through that process.

Connect to WP Engine

Step 1: Enable API Access

Go to the API Access page under Users > API Access to manage API settings and click “Manage”. Next, click to enable “Account API Access”.

Step 2: Generate API Credentials

Now that Account API Access is enabled, go to the API Access page to generate API credentials. Click “Generate credentials”.

Leave this window open because you’ll need to copy your API Username and API Password into Local. After copying this information into Local, you can close this window.

Step 3: Install Local

Make sure you’re running the latest version of Local.

Step 4: Log in to WP Engine within Local

The last thing is to use the credentials that were generated on WP Engine’s site to log into Local!

Connect to Flywheel

Step 1: Navigate to the “Connect” tab in Local

To get started, navigate to the “Connect” tab in Local, and click the “Log in to Your Host” button.

Step 2: Log in to Flywheel

Select “Log in to Your Host” and select the log in link next to Flywheel.

Step 3: Enter Flywheel Credentials

You’ll be prompted to enter your Flywheel hosting credentials.

Step 4: Confirm the link to Local

Within your Flywheel account you’ll be prompted to confirm the link to Local.

Step 5: Confirm the connection in Local

Now that you’re logged in to your Flywheel account, you’ll get redirected back to Local. You’ll know you’ve logged in successfully because your Flywheel sites will now be listed within the “Connect” tab of Local!

Push and Pull

Once you’ve linked Local to a hosting provider you can pull a site down by navigating to the “Connect” tab in Local.

Select the host you want to work with from the Site Overview page for sites you already have in Local. You can click the “Pull” button to download changes from the remote site or select the “Push” button to deploy your Local site to staging or production.

Link a local site to a remote host other than WP Engine or Flywheel by selecting “No host selected” in the lower-right corner of the site-overview page.

Deploy a site by selecting the the “Push to…” button in the lower-right corner of the site-overview page.

Remote environments

Depending on the hosting provider, you have options for the kind of environment you can push-to or pull-from:

• Production
• Staging
• Development (WPE only)

By default, the production environment is used, but if you’d like to deploy to a staging environment that doesn’t exist, Local will direct you to create that environment.

When pulling or pushing a site, select the remote environment you’d like to work with.

If a staging environment doesn’t exist remotely, Local will prompt you to create one

MagicSync

The MagicSync viewer allows you to quickly see which files have changed between the Local and remote site and select which of those files should be deployed. More details about using the MagicSync viewer can be found in this help doc.

If you don’t need this fine-grained control over what gets deployed, you can disable MagicSync from “Preferences > MagicSync”.

Path Exclusions for Local Connect

When pushing or pulling a site, Local excludes certain files for security, performance, or reliability reasons.

Local excludes these paths relative to your site’s root:

• .connect-manifest.json
• .connect-pull.sql
• .connect-push.sql
• .fw-config.php
• .well-known
• flywheel-config
• index.php
• license.txt
• local-phpinfo.php
• readme.html
• wp-activate.php
• wp-admin
• wp-blog-header.php
• wp-comments-post.php
• wp-config-sample.php
• wp-config.php
• wp-cron.php
• wp-includes
• wp-links-opml.php
• wp-load.php
• wp-login.php
• wp-mail.php
• wp-settings.php
• wp-signup.php
• wp-trackback.php
• xmlrpc.php
• wp-content/upgrade
• wp-content/index.php
• wp-content/plugins/index.php
• wp-content/themes/index.php

Local excludes every occurrence of these paths within your site:

• .DS_Store
• .git
• .idea
• .env
• .svn
• node_modules

Special exclusions based on regex patterns:

• local-adminer-*.php