Local on Apple Silicon Macs

I bought an M1 over the weekend. Sometimes starting/stopping sites gets stuck.

Stopping just keeps going on forever… But if I quit the app then open it again, it acts like the site successfully stopped. So it seems the services get stopped but the app doesn’t realize it.

I’m also getting this error upon importing a site:

But that could be an import issue unrelated to M1… Restarting Local resolves that issue.

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I have seen the “stopping gets stuck” too. A restart of Local fixes for me too.

Occasionally I see this and ignoring it seems to be fine. I’ve also seen an warning about “fixing the site’s URL”. Doesn’t seem to be an actual issue.

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This isn’t M1 specific – we’ve seen this pop up within the last couple of releases of Local. You’re right that it’s a disconnect between Local and the underlying services.

The team is working on a fix that should be deployed with an upcoming release!

I’m not sure if we should start another thread for this related question, but here goes: What are the plans for an Apple Silicon native (Universal or separate of the Intel) build of Local? As I and others here have confirmed, Local is working fine under Rosetta 2. But performance there is somewhat limited. I’d love to see a native build at some point in the (near?) future. As other dev apps I use go native (VS Code on Insiders track already has) Local remains one of the outliers still relying on Rosetta 2. So, what are the plans for native support of Apple Silicon Macs? I know (from experience) that PHP and other tools that underlie Local are building fine natively on Apple Silicon via Homebrew, so imagine that the bulk of a Universal build still to work on is the GUI app. I just want to push the Local dev team to work on this.

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What performance issues have you noticed?

I’m really just referring to the inherent performance of Rosetta vs native. Which, to be fair, with Local and others, isn’t really noticeable. But it still exists in the technology. Since tools like Electron, PHP, and such are now being built native for Apple Silicon, Local really ought to follow suit and create a native release for these Macs.

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Any updates on an Apple Silicon native version of Local?

No updates on this. Since we haven’t seen any concrete metrics related to poor performance on Apple Silicon, the team has been focusing on other bugs and features.

I’m in the U.S. so unlikely to be affected by this right now, but the reports that macOS 11.3 removes Rosetta in some regions is another reason to prioritize making Local run natively. Once the underlying dependencies support Apple Silicon (PHP, Electron, etc. all do), so should Local. I’ve generally been assuming Rosetta will be around for at least 3 or so years, likely more, but these reports of certain regions maybe losing it much sooner just bring to light the transitory nature of the technology.

Supporting macOS really should mean making Local a Universal app (or, at least having builds for both architectures) at this point. I hope, at minimum, that whenever Apple announces, likely at some future WWDC, that Rosetta will be going away completely in that upcoming Fall’s macOS update, that the Local team will be ready to ship a native build within that summer. But, frankly, I hope that you guys ship such a build well before that absolute cutoff point that we don’t yet know when will be.

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There is zero likelihood that Apple removes Rosetta anytime soon. As long as Apple sells anything with an Intel chip, it will be around.

Those are all great points. The main thing I think about in relation to all this is that there’s a lot of uncertainty around dates and official messaging from Apple. Until there are firmer timelines in place, it’s hard to know what things to prioritize this over.

As afragen points out, as long as there are still Macs being sold with Intel chips, the likelihood of things going away in the near term is pretty small.

When you consider those things along with the fact that most installs of Local are for the Windows platform, we’ll likely not have a specific build for Apple Silicon in the near future, but you never know!

As part of the included components, the latest nginx should have full Apple Silicon Support:

Most performance issues should be related to the included components.
Any way to update these within the application?

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Performance increases if you replace nginx.
PHP 7.4 is also available for Apple Silicon:

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Hi, the problem for me is that I use some php extensions (like php-zmq) that i need to compile on machine, and make it incompatible with php on Local.

Thanks Ben!

Wouldn’t it be an option to provide a seperate Apple silicon (M1) build just including the already available dependencies? E.g. electron, nginx and php are all already available for Apples ARM Architecture.

Regarding the release of more Apple silicon Mac models the demand is constantly growing.

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This is definitely true and something that we’re constantly trying to adjust for!

That might be an option, but given the way that a number of these things are glued together, it’s hard to make everything work for all possible permutations that Local currently works on (Windows, Mac (intel) Mac (m1), all the Linux)

Thank you for your fast reply and great work Ben!

I totally understand that this is not a priority on your list at the moment.
I was just hoping that there might be a possibility to compile an experimental beta with the exisiting dependencies. :slight_smile: That way it would not be a complete Apple silicon app, but could improve performance significantly.

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The Intel transition was announced in summer 2005, and it completed by the end of 2006. Apple has already either partially or fully transitioned 4 of the 5 mac categories to M1, so the writing is on the wall.

I’m not suggesting Rosetta 2 will disappear over night, but it’s meant as a stepping stone - not a crutch. As long as Local requires emulation to run, it’s eating up performance that could be going to my other pro apps. This is a self-evident fact of emulation.

I love using Local! But it worries me to learn that the team is not already actively transitioning to the M1 platform. If it’s really going to be years before we see a native version, then I need to start looking for a different solution now. This thread already has 2.5k page views, so I doubt that I’m alone.

This is all absolutely correct, but it wasn’t until this year that we’ve even been able to get a computer with an M1 chip. Absolute breaking bugs have been fixed in Local already.

We’re looking at the best way to go about doing this. It’s not something that can happen overnight, but we agree with you that performance is important which is why it’s being prioritized over other things.

I don’t think it will be years before this is resolved. Months maybe. But again, Local has many build targets and many users. Solving the problem of managing WordPress sites locally (and solve it for everyone!) is a challenge, but it’s one that we’re happy to do!

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