Beware of .local virtual hosts on El Capitan

If you meet these conditions:

• You have a localhost website on OS X Yosemite or El Capitan.
• You have created a virtual host named [whatever].local
• You are using XAMPP, MAMP or some other bases.

Then you will probably have some problems with your WordPress installation in not being able to update the core files, themes, or plugins. Most notably, these problems are notified with the following message:

WordPress could not establish a secure connection to www.ads-software.com. Please contact your server administrator.

The source of the problem is related to a name conflict with the Apple Bonjour’s Multicast Domain Name Service, as discussed here:

• Trouble to access “.local” domain
• If you‘re unable to resolve or bind to domains that end in .local

To rectify the situation, just rename your virtual host with anything except something ending with “.local”. Some savvy wizards will probably be able to resolve that problem differently but for someone not too acquainted in DNS or Apache configuration like me, this is a straightforward and easy solution.

Such change is normally done in both of these files:

• hosts (no extension and found in folder /private/etc)
• httpd-vhosts.conf

As soon as my virtual host (was web.local in my case) was renamed otherwise, all these updating problems vanished immediately after a reboot!