Local WP is a major player in the local testing server space, and it’s popular with a lot of Genesis devs too. That’s with good reason: not only is it free and fast, but it also offers some sweet advanced features, including easy SSL setup for your sites.
Local supports all major operating systems, but we use Macs only here, and we discovered when we became Local users that we had to tweak Firefox to get it to recognize Local’s secure certificates (that’s just one more reason to love Firefox, by the way: Mozilla is dead serious about protecting your privacy).
First things first
By default, Firefox doesn’t recognize the self-signed certificates Local creates when you set up a secure site, but there’s a preference you can change to resolve the secure connection error.
- Open a new tab in Firefox and enter
about:configin the address bar, then click the blue button that says Accept the Risk and Continue. - Search for the preference name
security.enterprise_roots.enabledand change its value to true. - Restart Firefox.
- Now in Local, go to the new site and select the Database tab, then open Adminer. Click on the wp_options table and then Select Data. In the first two rows, make sure the
siteurlandhomeURLs begin with “https,” not “http.”
- Finally, open the new site in Firefox (you may have to manually insert “https” before the domain name in the URL bar), and see if the security error is still showing. If not, you’re all set!
The secret sauce
We recently updated our Macs to Big Sur, and sure enough, we started seeing security warnings in Firefox again! After some googling and tinkering, we discovered that the problem is Mac-based rather than Firefox-based.
This is something that Local WP will address eventually, so you may not always need to apply the Bug Sur contingency.
- Open the Keychain Access app on your Mac, select “System” in the sidebar, and locate the name of the site you just created in Local.
- Close the Keychain App and go back to Firefox.
- Once again, you may have to manually insert “https” before the domain name in the URL bar to see everything working.
