How to install a WordPress development version locally on OSX Catalina

This is an advanced topic for people wanting to host a wordpress site locally  on their own Mac. 

Local by Flywheel

I recommend Local by Flywheel. It’s so simple I don’t need to write any instructions on how to use it. It’s also free, unless you want to publish your sites publicly. I found the free version worked fine.

Local Flywheel  is a MacOS App that sets up a virtual machine, installs all the SQL etc, and installs WordPress all in one step.

When you setup flywheel DO NOT use the default domain of xxx.local as the ‘Site Domain’. It will cause problems later on when you use BrowserSync.  I found that xxx.mylocal worked fine. (xxx is the name of your website eg wayne.mylocal)

You can get it from here: https://local.getflywheel.com/

Bitnami

Otherwise, before I discovered flywheel I used Bitnami. I’ll leave the instructions here for Bitnami which may suit people who want a more customisable setup.

It can get very monotonous trying to develop a wordpress website live. You can download MAMP but it’s quite a process to setup. There’s an all in one wordpress installation by Bitnami which I just used under Mavericks and it’s great. It installs Apache, MYSQL, phpMyAdmin and all you need to run wordpress.

You can download it here:

Run it and you’ll see a screen like this:

Click ‘visit application’ to go to the webpage in Safari!

(It will be this address: http://localhost:8081/wordpress/)

Just a note, the auto install version from the App Store did not work for me. I think because my hard disk name has a space in it. The download the installer as a dmg file worked wonderfully.