Local app not recognizing my login to Local Hub

[adminciginc]

What issue or error are you experiencing?

I login to Local Hub, then click ‘open Local’, the app opens on my laptop, I select a site, start the site, then the app won’t open the site when I click ‘open site’ nor will it open ‘WP Admin’ when I click it. I also try to enable Live Link, but the app says I need to login to Local Hub, I click the link to do so, and it does not open Local Hub on a web-page like usual. This was all working fine yesterday. I have restarted, re-opened and closed all apps and web-pages repeatedly to no change in this condition.

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What steps can be taken to replicate the issue? Feel free to include screenshots, videos, etc

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System Details

• Local Version:9.2.8+6882

• Operating System (OS) and OS version:Linux Ubuntu - latest version

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Local Logs

local-lightning.log (166.5 KB)

Attach your Local Logs here (Help Doc - Retrieving Local’s Log)

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Security Reminder
Local does a pretty good job of scrubbing private info from the logs and the errors it produces, however there’s always the possibility that something private can come through. Because these are public forums, always review the screenshots you are sharing to make sure there isn’t private info like passwords being displayed.

[nickc]

Thanks for your report, @adminciginc.

Please try this first:

1. Restart your machine in case services such as keyring or polkit have crashed. Since things worked yesterday, this is worth trying.

2. Start Local again and allow any password prompts that appear when you create or start a site.

If that doesn’t help, your log shows two separate issues:

1. Sites not starting (permission error)

SiteProcessManagerService | Unable to start site.
Error: Error: User did not grant permission.

Error executing command as another user: Not authorized
exitCode: 127

Local needs permission to write to /etc/hosts in order to start sites in domain mode and run nginx on a priority port. If you cancel the prompt (or no prompt appears), sites will fail to start and buttons like Open Site or WP Admin won’t work.

On stock Ubuntu, Local normally has everything it needs (pkexec, provided by policykit-1) to show you a prompt to allow it to start nginx on port 80 and write to /etc/hosts.

First, check if PolicyKit is running:

ps aux | grep polkit

• If you see /usr/libexec/polkitd (or similar), PolicyKit is running. In that case, quit Local completely, reopen it, and try starting a site again being sure to accept the password prompt. If you accidentally denied it once, the only fix is to restart Local and accept it.

• If you don’t see polkitd, install/reinstall it:

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install policykit-1 policykit-1-gnome
  

Also confirm your user is in the sudo group in case you accidentally removed it since yesterday:

groups

You should see sudo listed. If not, you won’t be able to grant permissions to run nginx on a priority port when Local asks for this.

2. Hub login not persisting (safeStorage read/write errors)

Error: safeStorage encryption unavailable, not persisting data for hub-api
…
Error encrypting data at: %%userDataPath%%/hub-api.json"

Local uses your system’s keyring to encrypt Hub credentials (details in the safeStorage docs).

Check if the keyring daemon is running:

ps aux | grep keyring

• If you see gnome-keyring-daemon --daemonize --login, the service is running. Make sure the keyring is unlocked:

  1. Open the Passwords and Keys app (seahorse).
  2. Select the Login keyring.
  3. If it shows “locked,” unlock it with your login password.
     
     
  4. Restart Local and sign in again.

• If you don’t see gnome-keyring-daemon, install it:

  sudo apt install gnome-keyring libsecret-1-0 seahorse
  

Other things you can check

• Make sure /etc/hosts is owned by root:root with permissions rw-r--r--.
• If you made any changes like switching desktop environments (e.g. from GNOME to KDE) since Local was working for you yesterday, you may need to install and configure keyring/PolicyKit manually.