While developing a website recently, I was wondering where WPLocal php error logs are located. I was not able to find much information online about it, so I thought I would write a quick article to help out.
If you are not familiar with WPLocal, it is a program that makes hosting development WordPress sites locally on your machine extremely easy. Gone are the days of needing to setup XAMPP and over manage most of the setup. This is as simple as a couple clicks to get your site up and running. If you are using WPEngine as your hosting provider, it has direct syncing capabilities!
Where to find WPLocal PHP Error Logs?
Its actually quite simple. They are located inside the site folder that is created by WPLocal when they generate your site. To get to the WPLocal PHP error logs, simply follow the steps below.
PHP Error Logs
First, you will want to open up WPLocal and navigate to the site you would like to check the error logs for. In my case, I am looking at my “Best Battery Search”.
Click on the “Go to site folder” link in the display’s top left(ish). This will open up your file browser that your native operating system uses.

The folder that was opened is called the “Site Folder”. This contains all of the data that is related to the site you are working on within WPLocal.
Next, click on the “logs” folder.

Here we see two more folders named php and nginx. PHP error log files are related to the code, while nginx is related to the hosting and serving of the files.
Next, we click on the “php” folder to get to the error logs.

Finally! We made it to some log files!
- error.log – This contains all of the errors related to php and the execution of the code on the pages you are loading/working on. In most cases, this is the file that you will be looking for!
- php-fpm.log – This file contains the logs in reference to the php-fpm service. Most likely you will not find any useful information in this file for debugging purposes.

What do the WPLocal PHP error logs look like?
Now that we have found the PHP error logs, all we need to do is open or tail the file. I will usually keep a terminal window open on my machine and tail the file so that I can see new errors as they are entered into the log.
When we open the error.log file you can see that we get all of the PHP errors. Currently, my website is not liking the xDebug feature. Side note: In the latest WPLocal release there is now an option to turn xDebug off!

As you can see now that the errors logs are open, I have an issue with the $doesnotexist
variable in my function.php
file. I can now easily resolve this issue!
Wrap up
As you can see it was easy to find WPLocal PHP error logs. If you have any other questions about WPLocal, drop them in a comment below and I will do my best to answer them and/or write a tutorial.
If you would like to suggest a new article or video to be released, please reach out via the Contact Page. I look forward to hearing your feedback and providing content that is helpful for you!