No Access After WP Site Duplication

Support
1

I recently updated from “Local Classic” to “Local Lighting” on my Windows 10 machine, since “Local Classic” is no longer supported. First, thank you for creating an easy-to-use local WordPress hosting environment. Unfortunately, while Local Lightning is indeed more performant than Local Classic, I came across a problem with my WordPress development (version 5.6.2). Specifically, I use Duplicator Lite by Snap Creek, which simplifies the process of backing up and/or migrating a WordPress site. I’ve used this plugin and its various updates for about two years without incident. It has worked when migrating WordPress web sites to/from my local development & remote production environments and solely within my local development environment when I work on multiple versions of a WordPress web site in development.

Nothing else being changed, I immediately experienced a problem with this plugin when I switched over to “Local Lightning”. Since this particular plugin is important to my workflow, I decided for now to revert back to “Local Classic” if and until this issue is resolved. In summary, each time I attempt to run a WordPress web site in “Local Lightning” migrated via Duplicator Lite, I encounter the following error message:

“Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.”

For details about this error, please see my post to the WordPress Duplicator Lite forum: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-access-after-wp-site-duplication/?loggedout=true. As I noted in that post, I wonder if I need to change a “Local Lightning” configuration setting due it natively running under Windows 10, where this was not required with “Local Lightning” because its virtual machine environment was less restrictive in terms of access permissions. Of course, this is shot in the dark on my part. Also, I do not wish to imply there is a problem with “Local Lightning”. More likely, there is an oversite on my part.

I appreciate your investigating this issue and providing feedback. Thank you.

2

This is a general security feature of WordPress, so not quite an error – but not helpful for you! The key is to figure out why WordPress is blocking access for you.

I know that a number of users here in the forums make use of duplicator, so this should be working. A few things to explore:

  • Do things work with different versions of PHP? It’s possible that there is a PHP error from one of the plugins, and using a different version of PHP would not trigger the error.

  • If you disable the plugins or set the base theme to a default one, does that grant you access?

3

I can try altering the PHP version from within Local Lightning’s UI. However, I can neither change themes nor disable plugins, since I am unable to access my WordPress dashboard. The “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.” error message appears once I start up my WP web site with Local Lightning and then click on the “Admin” button to log into my WP web site’s WP dashboard.

4

One way to disable plugins or themes is to do so from the terminal using wp-cli. The specific steps look something like this:

  1. Right click on the site and select open site shell
  2. Within the terminal that opens type these commands:
wp plugin list
wp theme list
wp plugin deactivate --all
wp theme activate twentytwentyone

The first two commands will give you an idea of what’s already installed on the site. The last two commands will deactivate all the plugins, and switch to the default, twentytwentyone theme.

It’s possible that something is causing fatal PHP errors, in which case, you might need to add --skip-plugins and --skip-themes to the above commands in order to get them to work. Something like:

wp plugin list --skip-plugins --skip-themes

Hope that helps get you zeroed in on what’s going on!

5

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