This is a pretty specific issue that we’ve been facing for some time, but I find it hard to believe that we are the only group facing the issue. The tl;dr is that we use WP Engine as our hosting provider, Git (BitBucket) for version control, and BitBucket pipelines to deploy code changes. With this setup we’ve not been able to successfully set up a local development environment using WP Engine’s own tools.

Ultimately our wishlist includes:

• The ability to pull a site from WP Engine into Local by WP Engine for local development
• Continue to use our BitBucket pipelines for code deployment and version control
• The ability to easily sync/push/pull database changes and /uploads/ between WP Engine and the local development environment.

Here are some of the things we’ve run into:

1. Local/WP Engine Pull: When pulling sites from WP Engine to Local, we are constantly running into issues with Wordfence and WP Rocket, resulting fatal PHP errors because these plugins reference directory structures in the WP Engine Server which do not align with our local machines. Deactivating these plugins prior to pulling down does not solve the issue.
2. Local/WP Engine Push: Does not utilize version control and therefore by pushing changes through the Local tool we create conflicts between our local repository and the remote. For this reason we do not push changes up through the tool but still need a way to ensure the database changes and file uploads in our local site can be pushed up.

Happy to provide more detail, just hoping someone out here also uses bitbucket pipelines, wp engine, and the Local App for development that may have some answers!