Hey @aaronmclayton, Welcome to the Local Community Forums and thanks for taking the Beta for a spin!
It’s hard to know what might be failing. Can you please provide your Local Log? See this Community Forum post for instructions on how to do so:
In terms of accessing the shell without the UI – you might be able to. When you click the “Open site shell” button in Local, a shell script is created in:
~/Library/Application\ Support/Local/ssh-entry/<site-hash>.sh
If that script is created, you should be able to manually call that script from within a shell to get the necessary context set up.
The main problem I could see happening is that Local wasn’t able to create that script. Can you take a look a the Local log and let us know if there are any errors contained within there?