Force site links to use localhost

I do hope someone can help please.

Ive downloaded a site from my server and installed MAMP (Free Version) on OSX sonoma. After a lot of faffing I’ve got the site up and running but it only loads the home (index.php) page. If I click any of the links it says ‘The requested URL was not found on this server.’ I can edit the URL to correct this to get other pages, but I need to log in to the back-end to fix a problem and it wont let me even though I have the correct login details.

Thanks in advance to all you clever bods out there!

I’ve actually figured this out by myself! I installed the same core version as a new blank dummy site, then copied over all the config files concrete/config, then compared each file with the current ones and altered the code accordingly until it worked. Pat myself on the back as I’m just a designer not a coder.

Whenever I clone a site to my local computer, I do several things first:

  1. I delete everything under /application/files/cache leaving an empty ‘cache’ folder.
  2. Go to Dashboard → System and Settings → SEO and Statistics → URL’s and Redirection and clear the checkmarks and boxes.
  3. After cloning the site on the new server and BEFORE I try to fire it up locally, I clear the contents of the local .htaccess file leaving a blank file on the localhost.

Now I fire the local site up and see what happens. If the settings you cleared are important, head to the Dashboard and reset the Canonical and Pretty URL stuff which should load the settings back into the cloned site.

If I forgot to go to the “URL’s and Redirection” section to turn off all the Canonical and Pretty URL stuff before I cloned the site, I head to /application/config/generated_overrides/ and open the ‘concrete.php’ file and scroll down to the SEO section and set things to ‘false’.

image

I hope this helps.

Thanks mhawke, thats very clear.

I discovered by checking the url settings in these two files…
application/config/database.php
application/config/generated_overrides

They were set to the http and https addresses, so I changed them both to localhost:8888 and it all worked like a dream. I can now log into the back end locally.