Local is an easy-to-use WordPress installer which will help you to install WordPress, as the name suggests, locally on your system. They have apps available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. If you have your site on compatible hosting (Flywheel and WP Engine at the moment), you can upload your locally developed site to their servers. You can do the opposite too – clone your site from their servers and then work on it locally. In this review, I will give a walkthrough of Local by Flywheel.
Local Website
In order for us to use Local, we need to download it first. You can get the installer for your specific operating system by visiting their website at https://localwp.com/
You don’t need to create an account, but you need to give your email ID in order to download it (I hate this part). After it’s downloaded, install it with the default options.
User Interface of Local
When you will launch local for the first time, you will see a screen similar to the picture shown above. Here, you will have two panels – left and right. Left panel options are dedicated for different plugins that you can install for Local (this has no relation with WordPress plugins) and there is an option for deploying your site to Flywheel and WP Engine too in the right-hand pane. For this review, I will mostly focus on the local development of a WordPress site by Local.
Next, click on Create a new site button in the center of the screen in order to open the new site creation wizard.
New Site Creation
Next, you will be presented with some options for your WordPress site. You can leave everything at default. Alternatively, you can also refer to the screenshots below to configure your new site.
This is how you can set up a new WordPress site in mins in Local
Other Features of Local
Apart from local development, Local has some other features too which helps site developers tremendously in their workflow. They are shown in the screenshots below.
Verdict
Local is an extremely useful tool for WordPress developers and users alike. One can use it to just run WordPress locally without going through the hassle of setting up LAMP/LEMP stack manually on their system.
In short, it’s currently the best way to host a WordPress site locally, quickly.
