How to install localwp, How to Setup Localwp on Mac, Windows, Ubuntu, Linux, Create New WP Site 2026

LocalWP's homepage bills it plainly as "The #1 local WordPress development tool," with a single Download for Free button front and center. The site detects your operating system and offers the matching installer: a Mac .dmg, a Windows .exe, or a Linux package.

It asks for an email address before releasing the download link, so have one ready. If you'd rather host instead of develop locally, there's also a Get Hosting link next to the download button, but that's a separate product from the local tool covered here.

Before installing, confirm your machine clears LocalWP's baseline: at least 4GB of RAM and roughly 1.5GB of free disk space, running macOS Monterey (12) or higher, Windows 10 64-bit or Windows 11, or a 64-bit Linux distribution. Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and any 32-bit build are no longer supported.

On Linux, Local ships both a Debian-based (.deb) build and an RPM-based (.rpm) build, but its own team formally tests only Ubuntu and Pop!_OS; other distributions such as Fedora or Debian itself will likely work but aren't officially verified. These aren't demanding numbers, but checking first saves a failed install partway through on an older laptop or a machine already tight on storage.

Open the downloaded file and walk through the setup prompts, which mostly ask where to install the app and whether to launch it once finished. Mac and Windows installs are single-package installers and tend to be the fastest.

Windows may show Defender pop-ups during setup; allow each one so Local's internal components can talk to each other. On Linux, double-click the .deb or .rpm file to hand it to your system's package manager, or install it from the command line. Across every platform, Local handles the underlying server environment itself, so there's no separate step to install PHP, MySQL, or a web server by hand.

Once Local is open, creating a site is the point of the tool: name your site, and Local provisions a complete WordPress install behind the scenes, ready to open in your browser or log into as an admin within a minute or two. This replaces what used to require a hosting account, a domain, and a manual WordPress installation just to test a theme or a plugin.

Local's own feature list explains why setup feels fast: one click and the site is ready, SSL included, so you get a working HTTPS local site without configuring a certificate yourself. One-click admin logs you straight into the WordPress dashboard without juggling usernames and passwords for each site.

Live Links can generate a persistent, shareable URL for a site still running only on your machine, useful for showing a client or coworker a work in progress without deploying it anywhere. A database tool gives direct access to WordPress tables for anyone who needs to inspect or edit them without a separate app. For anyone who needs to go further, Local also exposes root SSH access, WP-CLI, and the ability to swap PHP versions for compatibility testing.

Once your local site is running, the WordPress admin behaves like a hosted install: search and install themes and plugins from the repository, upload a zip file, or activate a page builder like Elementor to test it before it ever reaches a production server. This is the main reason developers keep sites in Local long after the initial build — it's a safe place to try a plugin update or theme change with nothing on the line.