Many repeated thread in support history to do with ioncube loader, a whopping 20+, with no solutions, other than a linux one 5 yrs ago. Time has since moved on, and that is out date.
Ionloader is used by the Alidropship plugin, and proprietary wordpress themes such as Shoptimizer, and more.
There are new straight forward instructions given in the ioncube loader wizard webpage .local/ioncube/loader-wizard.php
However it seems localwp overwrites the changes made to php.ini, removing the addition of code to load ioncube, and leads to another rabbit hole of how to work around that.
I found a solution for that particular issue in this thread Modifying php.ini file gets reverted after site restart - #7 by alikasaei
which my theme now runs, but the alidropship plugin still does not.
As per a user request in the forums, but not in this feature request area, which I am now doing, can we please have a feature to have the ability to turn ioncube loader on/off, maybe in Tools tab, and then its downloaded etc, just like when we change php and wordpress versions.
To use files that have been protected by the ionCube PHP Encoder, a component called the ionCube Loader must be installed.
For a local server you should install the ionCube Loader using the php.ini configuration file.