Unable to install on Linux Mint 22 or Ubuntu 24

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Hey @Walter , thanks for your patience with this and I’m glad you found a work around.

It looks like we did “fix” this issue in v9.2.5

  • Improved Ubuntu 24 and Fedora compatibility by bundling missing dependencies that are no longer included in latest Linux releases. Previously, this was causing issues installing Local and starting nginx on these operating systems.

More specifically, there were two rough issues that were addressed in the above release:

  • The Local installer used to require libncurses.so.5 and when an OS couldn’t satisfy that dependency, it refused to install. Technically, Local core (ie, the actual app that you click around) doesn’t require libncurses – it’s MySQL that does. Because of this, we remove that hard requirement on the Local installer

  • Because the actual dependency comes from MySQL, we updated the Lightning Service (roughly the MySQL environment, plus some wrappers so Local Core can manage those processes) to include libncurses.so.5. This was necessary so that when you created a new site using Local, it was able to finish creating a site and importing SQL files.

You didn’t say explicitly, but I think you probably ran into the issue within a site shell – correct?

If that’s true, you’re probably wondering why it’s still broken in the terminal and why it’s preventing you from importing a sql file.

I was able to work around it by updating the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point to the lib folder of the MySQL lightning service. This is roughly the fix that we implemented in those other situations.

The specific command was this one, though if new versions of MySQL are released, the path might change:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:${HOME}/.config/Local/lightning-services/mysql-8.0.35+4/bin/linux/lib"

ubuntu-24.04--libncurses-in-terminal
ubuntu-24.04--libncurses-in-terminal3200×1800 493 KB

While QA’ing, I did notice that some wpcli db commands are broken, but that’s a known issue with wpcli in our environment: Unable to run some wp-cli DB commands

I’ve added a ticket to our backlog to implement this fix. Anyway, the wp db import command should work again with this workaround and our eventual fix.

Thanks again for finding this issue and letting us know about it!

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