Polypane and local servers

This page covers using Polypane alongside local dev server tools: automatic reloading utilities, the Browsersync proxy, and local hosting tools like WPEngine Local.

For IDE and code editor integrations (VS Code Live Server, Tumult Hype, Visual Studio, etc.), see Integrations.

Launch Polypane from your server

If your local dev server automatically opens the URL it serves, you can configure your device to always open localhost in Polypane. If you can configure a specific browser instead, you can use Polypane in stead of other browsers too. Polypane will automatically open a new tab when active, or launch with a new tab containing your URL.

Browsersync

Polypane offers synced interactions and live reloading natively, so Browsersync's Ghost mode is largely redundant when using Polypane. Polypane will automatically disable some of its syncing when it detects Browsersync, to prevent the two from interfering with each other.

To launch Polypane when you start Browsersync, add --browser 'polypane' to your CLI command. This also works with opn, webpack-dev-server and similar tools.

We recommend migrating away from Browsersync's Ghost mode and using Polypane's native features instead. See Browsersync and Polypane for a full migration guide.

WPEngine’s Local Development Tool

Local WordPress sites that are created using WPEngine’s “Local” development tool use self signed certificates for https that cannot be trusted by Chromium based browsers like Polypane. This prevents urls fetched from the local Wordpress API such as post thumbnails to render when trying to load them.

To fix the issue, you must set the certificate’s trust on your local system to trusted. There is a button within the Locals tool next to SSL to "Trust" on your local system. If you’re using Mac, there are extra steps to take that are documented here.

After trusting the self signed cert on your machine, Polypane will be able to display images from URLs fetched from your Local WordPress instance. This is useful if you’re using WordPress in a headless manner.