Flywheel Local stuck on starting local machine

For all of my local development when it comes to WordPress I used Local by Flywheel. I always liked the hosting provisions that Flywheel provided and when they released their local development app which didn’t require you having Flywheel hosting I jumped straight in.

Stuck on starting local machine

Recently I updated to the latest version of Mac OS, Mojave 10.14, and I also removed a 5 Gigabyte file that I had used for testing websites in IE11 with Windows 7.  One of those changes seemed to have an impact on the Local Flywheel because when I launched the app it would show me

starting local machine….

and nothing else.

After upgrading to the latest version of Local by Flywheel I was getting the same problems so I turned to Duck Duck Go to see if others had the problem. 

A few matches led me to checking Virtual Box where I had 3 virtual machines (in addition to the Local by Flywheel VM) which were all throwing errors. These were IE6/7/11 VM’s I used for testing which I’ve since removed the VM files, but not cleaned up Virtual Box to stop referencing them.

Sure enough, as soon as those were removed and I went back to look at Local by Flywheel the waiting was over and I had access to all my sites again.

If you do local WordPress Development and haven’t checked out Local by Flywheel yet I highly recommend it.