I know it’s not the first time this has been talked about. I think it’s time we get it implemented or that we get a definitive no from the developers
According to this error message we can only chose path from within ~Users/ or another drive.
While every other AMP software will strongly suggest (but will never force you) to use a path like C:/xampp or C:/wamp, if you don’t have an external drive local forces to reorganize entire project archiving around C:/Users, which might not be an option for some people.
I don’t understand why it would work with any other drive letter and not C:/ this makes no sense to me. I use a backup solution which would really benefit from an invariable path between my computers ( “User” being variable doesn’t fit) and I don’t want to store my work files on an external or additional drive (and i’m not going to buy an extra hard drive for every computer just because local by flywheel developer team decided that we can’t use the folder we want as our project folder).
One other thing that benefits from not having a variables in it’s path are SQL/wordpress databases. Would be easier to move around if on any computer I used my path was something like "C:/pathnotdependantofwhichcomputerimcurrentlyworkingon/workfiles/ I could work on the same backup from one computer to another and transfer database without any search and replace but for some reason with the current Local by flywheel software, this is only OK if it’s on a USB stick but not where you want. I can’t setup my own backup solutions on my local drive. I’m 100% sure if you remove the warning and let us chose what we want we can make it work.
Maybe in some edgecases it would be an issue, but that would probably be fixed by running local by flywheel as an administrator and use C:/any/path/we/want even if it’s not recommended, at least we could be free to make our own bad choices knowingly. Let it be our issue, not yours. There is no justification to prevent developers to configure their developments environment as they see fit. I want to host my project from within my project folder. It’s not located in C:/Users and I only have one drive.
Now what ?
Well I actually just found a dirty solution which we have to use and is probably worse for security. But essentially : you can create a fake external drive on windows with subst
so you could do something like this :
subst L: C:\
Which would mount your C drive as an L drive without taking any space and enabling you to set the path in local by flywheel.
Or you could do something more specific to have only your projects folder or dev folder inside the L: drive.
subst L: C:\specificfolder
The things we have to do…
Related threads history :
2021 : Dev Team : “I don’t know the specific reason that Local can’t use a folder outside of the User’s folder”
2021 : Dev Team : “I’m not 100% sure of the reason for that requirement”