Permissions and local site access issues for WPEngine pulled sites

Support
1

What issue or error are you experiencing?

Pulling sites from WPEngine. Win11. After pull the sources files seems to be locked and not accessible by LocalWP. The result is a 403 on *.localhost

“Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe”

Newly created local sites via LocalWP are not affected. Sites pulled from WPEngine seem to be locked somehow.

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

Created a clean site (not pulled from WP Engine). Clean site OK. Pulled sites have issues (see screenshot below)

image
image1088×477 53.9 KB

System Details

  • Local Version: Version 9.2.5+6810

  • Operating System (OS) and OS version: Windows 11

Local Logs

{“class”:“ImporterWPE”,“level”:“warn”,“message”:“Unable to import site.”,“stack”:“Error: Command failed: “%%userDataPath%%\lightning-services\php-8.2.27+1\bin\win64\php.exe” “%%resourcesPath%%\bin\wp-cli\wp-cli.phar” --path=“D:\www\_localwp\zealarts\app\public” --require=“%%resourcesPath%%\bin\wp-cli\local-wpcli-error-reporting.php” --skip-plugins --skip-themes --url=z____.wpengine.com “search-replace” --all-tables-with-prefix “http://z____.wpengine.com” “http://z____.local”\n\n at genericNodeError (node:internal/errors:983:15)\n at wrappedFn (node:internal/errors:537:14)\n at ChildProcess.exithandler (node:child_process:414:12)\n at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:518:28)\n at ChildProcess.emit (node:domain:489:12)\n at maybeClose (node:internal/child_process:1101:16)\n at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:304:5)”,“thread”:“main”,“timestamp”:“2025-07-30T05:54:20.882Z”}

Summary: Issue exists on sites pulled from WPEngine. Files are downloaded to the local filesystem however windows cannot access the source files and throws permissions and non-existent errors.
This renders the site inaccessible.

2

Welcome, @juuce. Thanks for this bug report and your helpful screenshots.

This is a known issue on Windows when pulling sites to a non-C or non-system drive (it looks like your sites are on your D drive?)

The next version of Local will include a fix for this. It should be out this month, but I don’t have an exact timeline yet. Until then, the workaround is to stores sites on the C drive.

1 Like
3

Thank you. Yes, moving to C: has resolved the issue. Looking forward to the flexibility of different drives (at least local anyway :slight_smile: smb over network may introduce different issues but that’s another story)

Workaround successful.

Side note: What is strange is the newly created ‘blank/vanilla’ sites DO work from D: drive. It’s only WPEngine pulled sites that have the issue. (the TEST01 site proves success)

4

A fix for this is available in Local 9.2.6, out now.

https://localwp.com/releases/9.2.6/

Local will now ask to update your site’s file permissions after pulling if it’s located on a non-system drive on Windows.

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5

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