Can't access ANY of our WP Engine sites by browser after LocalWP install - 403 error

Support
1

After install, I cannot navigate to ANY of the 23 WP Engine sites.

Description

I installed Local and pulled 1 site locally.

Now I get 403 Forbidden errors on ALL the sites on WP Engine, after connecting.
This happens for ALL our WP Engine sites, even though I’m only working on 1 site.

Replication

I had an existing server running and built on my machine using the EXISTING Apache from OSX, and installing PHP (brew), Certificate + CA, and MySQL (brew).

I did click the localhost checkbox in LocalWP. I have since Uninstalled LocalPM to try to remove this issue.

System Details

This is on OSX 12.5.1 - Monterey.

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My guess is that this is something in the hosts file. But which hosts file? and how do I fix this?
I tried uninstalling LocalWP and it STILL did not remove the configuration that caused this.

How do I remove this configuration, and get browser access to the remote sites again?

2

Hello @WPSuperheroes - thank you for bringing your question the Local community.

Can you clarify, when you say you get a 403 Forbidden error on all the sites you have on WP Engine, are these live sites? Can you provide an example so I can see what you see?

A screen shared video may be helpful as well.

Let’s get this sorted!

Sam

3

Here is a video:

Here is someone else with a very similar problem who ALSO was stuck like me for over 2 days.

And here is where I posted it on these Forums for the 1st time, but did not receive a response.

Your support is appreciated.

4

Have you checked the default MacOS hosts file in /etc/hosts? Are there entries for the WPE sites in there?

What are you seeing in the Network tab of the browser’s dev tools when you try to connect to the front-end of a site (like mariasplace.com)? Is it trying to hit the correct IP address, or a local IP address?

5

Yes, I also checked this file. It held the same thing. Only reference to the single site downloaded.

I reset EVERYTHING, then eventually gave up and shut the computer down.
I don’t know what solved this, but it seems to be solved now.

6

Sounds like either local resolver or browser caching of the host lookup.

Glad that you’re moving forward again.