“Local’s router is having trouble starting” after updating from 9.2.5 (Intel) to 9.2.8 (Apple Silicon)

[johnrellis]

What issue or error are you experiencing?

After updating from 9.2.5 (Intel) to 9.2.8 (Apple Silicon) on an M2 Mac, I get the error “Local’s router is having trouble starting”.

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

After updating to 9.2.8 (Apple Silicon) and doing the following steps, the error still occurs:

1 - Exit Local.

2 - Run these commands in Terminal:

$ sudo lsof -i:80; sudo lsof -tnP -i:80 | xargs -n 1 ps -p
Password:
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Local/run/router

3 - Start Local.

4 - I observe the error. I also observe that the router error.log contains these errors:

2025/09/24 18:49:40 [emerg] 9364#0: unknown directive "http2" in /Users/john/Library/Application Support/Local/run/router/nginx/conf/server-block-ssl.conf:3

I used Time Machine to roll back to 9.2.5 (Intel) and the previous contents of ~/Library/Application Support/Local, and Local then works correctly (and I can get work done).

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System Details

• Local Version: 9.2.8 (Applie Silicon)

• Operating System (OS) and OS version: Mac OS 15.5.

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Local Logs

local-logs.zip (1.2 MB)

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[nickc]

Thanks for the report and sorry you ran into this, @johnrellis.

Please could you try this?

1. Upgrade to Local 9.2.8, Apple Silicon version — you can download it directly from https://localwp.com/releases/.
2. Quit Local.
3. Open a terminal and run this:

    rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Local/lightning-services/
   

4. Start Local and try to start a site.

This will replace any old Intel binaries you had from the old install with new Apple Silicon ones and upgrade nginx to the latest version that ships with Local. (The latest nginx version should no longer show an error about the http2 directive.)

[johnrellis]

Thanks very much, that seems to have fixed the problem.

After restarting Local, I did see this error:

but the site did in fact start without problems. Here are the log files, in case they’re of interest:

local-logs1.zip (1.3 MB)

[nickc]

Thanks for letting us know, @johnrellis, and for sharing these logs. If you’re not seeing that error consistently you don’t need to adjust anything. If we can help with anything else, feel free to ask.