Editing etc/hosts requires admin account

Bug Summary

To operate within the UK Public Sector under the Cyber Essentials+ scheme users cannot have administrative accounts for day to day work. Local is great because it can be run without elevated permissions however it does still request and require an admin username and password to edit the etc/hosts file on MacOS (Ventura) regardless of the actual hostfile permissions.

Steps to reproduce

On MacOS set the permissions for the etc/hosts file to be read/write for all* and verify this by opening the file in a text editor, leave a comment and save. It wont prompt for a password. Now setup a new site in Local and when it goes to write changes to the hostfile it prompts for an admin username and password with the message ‘Local wants to make changes Enter an administrators name and password to allow this’. It is possible for us to go and setup the hostfile manually to enable local URLs but it would be far more convenient to handle this within Local.

*It’s certainly not recommended to change the hosts permissions but we are doing other things within our MDM system to ensure that this file is protected. Unfortunately we have to adhere to the legislation and requirements of Cyber Essentials+ which stipulates that day-to-day user accounts cant be administrators unfortunately.

Environment Info

MacOS Ventura (13.2.1)
Standard MacOS User (non administrator)

Supporting info

Screenshot 2023-03-14 at 16.59.51

Include any screenshots or video recordings of the issue to help others reproduce.