Local WordPress development on Asahi Linux

Two things trip up local development tools on Apple Silicon Linux:

• ARM64. Many desktop apps for Linux only publish x86_64 builds, and Asahi can't run those directly.
• 16K memory pages. Asahi's kernel uses 16K pages instead of the usual 4K. Some software assumes 4K pages and crashes on start. Builds that use the jemalloc memory allocator are a common example.

You can check your page size with:

getconf PAGESIZE   # 16384 on Asahi

LocalPress is developed on an Apple Silicon Mac running Fedora Asahi Remix, with the 16K page kernel. Every container image it uses runs there:

It works with both Docker and rootless Podman, with SELinux enforcing.

1. 1

   Download

   Get LocalPress. It's an ARM64 RPM.
2. 2

   Install

   sudo dnf install ./LocalPress-aarch64.rpm

3. 3

   Create a site

   Podman comes with Fedora Asahi Remix, and LocalPress starts it for you.

For more detail, see the Fedora guide.