LocaL by Flywheel is so convenient, yet also a total nightmare

Support
1

Flywheel always ends up hanging on ‘Starting virtual machine’, it will work for a week or so and then the inevitable will happen…

This time I tried completely uninstalling Flywheel and reinstalling the latest version, I also removed the Virtual Box associated. When I did this all of my sites display:

Error! Container is missing. You will need to restore this site from a backup or previous export.

I tried following this guide to resolve the issue but when I get to the step were I need to paste this:

myloader -p root -d /app/sql --overwrite-tables --database local

I am left with this error after entering this command:

** (myloader:332): CRITICAL **: the specified directory is not a mydumper backup

root@f1f08766c9f8:/#

Any idea how I can solve this? I’ve started using MAMP as it’s a lot more reliable however I feel Local is a better product (Not including reliability).

2

Hi Nick,

I’m very sorry for the trouble!

Removing the VirtualBox VM when there are sites that haven’t been exported will cause issues. Are there any SQL files in the site’s /app/sql folder that you’re trying to reimport?

3

Thanks for the fast response, yes there are SQL files in there.

4

Glad to hear!

If you’re on macOS (let me know if you’re on Windows), can you please try the following?

  1. Open Terminal.app
  2. Change to the app/sql directory in Terminal. An easy way to do this is to type cd, press Space and then drag and drop the sql folder from Finder onto Terminal. Then press Enter
  3. Enter and run cat *.sql > local-site.sql
  4. Then, zip up the local-site.sql and the site’s wp-content folder into one zip. See the screenshot below for what this looks like.

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You should then see a new file named Archive.zip. Simply drag and drop it onto Local’s dock icon or main window to initiate an import.

5

I see the original poster didn’t write back, but I’m in the exact same boat except on Windows, can you provide the Windows version of your last instructions to the original poster?

6

I see all I needed to do was create a zip file with the sql files in app/sql folder and the wp-content folder then drag that into local.

7

Yup, that’s correct. The minimum required files are the wp-content folder and the SQL files.