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How to Migrate WordPress out of Local Flywheel

Introduction

I’ve had that time of my life again when I would spend complete hours fiddling around to get 1 solution working. In fact, that has used me more pomodoro timers. It’s that time again when you just simply burn yourself out, for an answer so obvious.
But setting that aside, I’ve had a challenge finding out how to migrate a WordPress website out of Local by Flywheel.
You might’ve read this post on Flywheel mentioning that they don’t allow certain plugins for backup, like ‘Backup Buddy’, among others. However, they are speaking of installing this as a registered member of Flywheelsites, not our Local by Flywheel.
I’ve accidentally dipped into a problem without noticing this, and hopefully I can solve this for you.

The scope of the problem

You may realise that your migration plugins like ‘All in One Migration’, ‘Duplicator’, ‘Backup Buddy’, etc. are not working. That these plugins seem to do well but give out a 503 server error whilst migrating on a remote destination, or just cannot complete properly in Local Flywheel itself.

The solution

The solution to fix your migration plugins will be to do the following:

  • Visit your Local Site’s installation directory
  • You can do this by visiting the Local Flywheel app’s Dashboard, right-clicking your Site’s name, and clicking ‘Reveal in Finder’
  • Next, drill down to the file
    [project]/conf/php/[version]/php.ini
  • Search for
    max_execution_time
  • This may be set by default to
    300
  • Please set this to a higher value, like
    600

    seems to be a good number

  • Finally, run the migration process again
  • Parting words

    If you ever experience a problem whilst following this guide, please feel free to brief in the comments below.
    Local by Flywheel is a great product, and it is the way to go in terms of WordPress development using containers, without all that hassle!
    Otherwise if you’ve found this helpful, please give a shout-out too! ??

    Acknowledgment

    I’d like to thank Clay from Flywheel for in fact finding the answer before me! I should’ve visited the forums for a quick search, but to give a shout-out you can view his solution here.