I have managed to get it working now, the solution was as follows:
My NAS was claiming ports 80 and 443 so i turned local to use localhost which bypasses the need for these ports.
Local also did not have the right permissions to alter the hosts file, which was causing issues since i was not getting a popup asking me if i would like to allow these permissions. the solution is to manually grant these permissions by doing the following:
- close local
- right click the .exe file
- click properties
- click the security tab
- click edit permissions
- make sure that both ‘Modify’ & ‘Write’ are checked under the ‘Allow’ column
This will now have granted Local the necessary access to modify the hosts file.
Upon opening Local again, an error message appeared on my copy of local saying the following:
“Warning! This site’s WordPress URL settings do not match the host set in Local”
Now clicking “Fix it” actually works and corrects the issue.
Now the links to open the site or enter the WP admin work.
Nick-B, please can you pass on the following suggestions to the relevant team members:
- Improve the in app error reporting, it took a long time to figure out what the problem was, whereas as soon as i installed and opened XAMPP it told me straight away what the issue was
- Add the below aforementioned points to your troubleshooting process
- Looking through the forums, i am not the first person to not be recieving the UAC message to allow Local to modify the hosts file, so can you start propagating the solution i mentioned above, by editing the permissions in properties under the security tab
- Ensure that people are aware that the ports 443 and 80 must be kept free in order for Local to work under the default settings