How to Find and Edit Your WordPress Files Locally?

In this article, we’re going to see how you can edit your WordPress files locally.

Now to edit your files you need two things:

1. You should know where the WordPress files are located on your computer.
2. Download the code editor to be able to edit these files properly.

If you want to learn the easiest way to install WordPress locally on your PC then you can refer to this article. This will make installing and editing WordPress on your PC as simple as ABC.

Find the Location of Your WordPress Files

Now there are two ways to find your WordPress files.

1. Accessing them directly from Localwp.
2. Finding them in the File Manager

If you followed our previous article then you must be having Localwp on your PC.

So let’s see how you can access your local WordPress files using Localwp.

Open Localwp on your PC and you’ll see this page.

Click on the file path below your website name. For example, in my case it is wordpress.

Now when you click on it then it will show you these three files:

1. app, (Contains all the Wordpress files like themes, plugins, etc.)
2. conf, and (Configuration files)
3. logs. (Log files — Information about any errors while an app is running etc.)

Now as we want to edit the WordPress files so we’ll open the app folder (or directory) and then the public folder.

If you don’t have Localwp on your system then you can find the WordPress folder by directly searching it in the search bar as shown here.

So now you can see all the WordPress files that you can edit easily using a code editor.

Next, let’s see how to install a code editor in order to be able to edit these files.

Download & Install the Code Editor

There are multiple code editors that you can install on your PC. We’re going to install the Atom code editor as it’s an open-source editor and is free to use for anyone.

To download the Atom just go to its official website by clicking here and the homepage will look like this.

Atom home page

Now download the editor by clicking on the Download button.

Next, install the code editor on your system. Just click on the AtomSetup-x64.exe file and it will install automatically.

Once the installation process is complete then Atom will launch automatically and it will look like this.

If you want to get familiar with the editor then you can reference the functions in the right side-bar.

Now if you want to edit any file in Atom them you can open it seperately in the editor.

But, generally when we’re editing the files in WordPress or editing a theme then we have to work on multiple files at once. So to edit them simultaneously we’ll insert the complete folder in the Atom code editor.

To insert a folder just drag the folder and drop it in the code editor.

Let’s say I want to insert a theme folder then I’ll drag it and drop it in the editor.

Before you start editing any file just remove the sections that are not necessary while editing as shown here.

Now if you want to edit any file then just double-click on it in the left side-bar and you can start editing it.

In the same way you can edit all the files in the Atom code editor.

Conclusion

So now you know how to find and edit you WordPress files locally (on your PC).

Either you can visit the folder directly from Localwp settings or you can also find them manually. Both the ways are totally fine.

Then we saw how to import a folder in the code editor in order to edit multiple files simultaneously.

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