Local Connect

The Local Connect feature helps you move a site between Local and your remote hosting provider.

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

Throughout the development process, you can pull down changes made to the remote site so you 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!

Connecting to a hosting provider

See the specific instructions for Connecting to Flywheel or Connecting to WP Engine. 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:

Import a WordPress Site to Local with WP Migrate

Pulling and Pushing

After linking Local to your hosting provider, pull a site down by navigating to the “Connect” tab in Local.

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

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.

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