Local Community

New site creation fails if using special characters in admin password

Bugs
#1

Site creation fails when there are certain special characters (at least ampersand “&” seems to be one of those characters, might be others as well) in the admin password defined during the setup process. I believe the characters should be escaped properly (by Local) to allow the use of strong passwords as they are completely valid when setting up a WP site normally outside Local automatic setup.

You can finish the setup after the error message by going to your .local URL and continuing the setup manually. You can even use the same Local-breaking password you first used when trying to set up the site and WP will have no problem using it.

Steps to reproduce

  • Add a new site
  • When asked, insert an admin password with special characters like ampersand (&), possibly also single quote (’) and backtick (`)

Environment Info

  • Windows 10 21H2 (19044.1766)
  • nginx, PHP 7.4.1, MySQL 8.0.16
  • Local 6.4.0+5927 (but this has been a bug for quite some time now)
#2

Hello there, @ooksanen! :wave:

I followed your steps and was not able to reproduce what you are experiencing.

Local is now on 6.4.1 - have you tried updating? You can find the latest release here:

Let me know if that helps!

Sam :woman_technologist:t3:

#3

Hi @sammunoz and thanks for your reply!

Unfortunately the problem persists even on 6.4.1. I tried to create a new site with following info:

Site name: Test
Local site domain: test.local (default)
Local site path: ~\Local Sites\test (default)
Enviroment: Preferred (same as in my original post)
WordPress username: admintest
WordPress password: 123& (tried with 123&456 too, just to be sure)
WordPress e-mail: dev-email@flywheel.local (default)
Multisite?: No (default)

And the end result was the same, an “Error Installing WordPress for [Site name]”:

localwp-error
localwp-error1711×989 171 KB

I tried some other special characters too, like backtick and single quote which I suspected might interfere with SQL commands if not properly escaped, but those seemed to work fine so it seems that only “&” breaks the installation.

EDIT: For clarification, OS, PHP, MySQL etc. were all the same in my last test as in my original post, except for Local, which I updated to 6.4.1 as per your suggestion.

If I remove the ampersand from admin password, install finishes correctly with all the other info being the same.

1 Like
#4

Hi @ooksanen - thank you for that information!

To clarify, it was the "&" that broke the installation, and without it, everything worked fine?

I tried to reproduce this using an "&" and it still created the site. I’m using MacOS - I wonder if this is a Windows issue?

Sam :woman_technologist:t3:

#5

Yes, that is correct. If I remove the ampersand from the password (i.e. insert a password without “&”), the installation finishes correctly.

Could well be that the different character encoding used on Mac and Windows is the underlying issue here. Also I’m based in a Nordic country, not in US, so I’m not sure if there’s even further character encoding differencies between systems to accomodate for our umlauts and whatnot. :smile:

If it’s of any help, here’s what my system says about the character encoding (these are all default Windows installation settings):

IsSingleByte : True
BodyName : iso-8859-1
EncodingName : Western European (Windows)
HeaderName : Windows-1252
WebName : Windows-1252
WindowsCodePage : 1252
IsBrowserDisplay : True
IsBrowserSave : True
IsMailNewsDisplay : True
IsMailNewsSave : True
EncoderFallback : System.Text.InternalEncoderBestFitFallback
DecoderFallback : System.Text.InternalDecoderBestFitFallback
IsReadOnly : True
CodePage : 1252

Hope this gets resolved as I use a password generator to generate unique passwords everywhere and I’d rather not exclude & from the characters in use.

1 Like
#6

Hi @ooksanen - this is such great feedback and information, thank you so much for sharing it all here and being so thorough.

Happy to have you in the Local community & I’ll be sure to pass this information along to the team.

You rock!

Sam :woman_technologist:t3:

#7

No, YOU rock @sammunoz! :smile:

Thanks for your help. Have a good one!

1 Like