I have a live site, but I’d like to work on it locally. However, it has an SSL and I believe that it is causing me issues. When I try to load the home page on local host I get the error message, “Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server at localhost.” I can see in the address bar that it keeps trying to open up the https…com address. I did change the address in phpmyadmin for home and siteurl, but it doesn’t seem to effect anything.
What am I missing?
I don’t really know. But if you don’t have SSL set up on your localhost, your server probably is not listening on port 443. What setup are you using for your local development server? If you use a setup like XAMPP, it has SSL enabled (I think by default, or you can easily enable it) so you could more accurately mimic your existing https production server.
You didn’t even say which operating system you are using. If you are on Windows you can check to see which ports have programs listening on them by using the netstat command in the terminal.
I’m working on windows 7 with WAMP. I’m not too familiar with ports.
I have never used WAMP. I use XAMPP and if my memory is correct, it had SSL enabled by default. If it didn’t, then it was easy to enable by uncommenting a few lines.
A little searching reveals that SSL can be enabled on WAMP.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17354788/enabling-openssl-in-wamp
If your production site has SSL enabled it may be best to have it on your local development setup. If you are determined to remove SSL, you will have to look for and disable any redirects to https in .htaccess files or any PHP or other scripts you are using. When SSL is used, it is standard practice to place something in htaccess or in the server’s config file to redirect non-https to https and also do so in scripts as a double check.
One more thing you may want to do is to make sure your firewall software (if you are using any) is not blocking any connections to port 443 on 127.0.0.1 or localhost.
Well, the solution actually ended up being simple. I am getting a 404 error now, but its not redirecting anymore. I had removed the redirect in the htaccess file, but I hadn’t cleared the cache for the browser.
As a developer, I set all my browsers (IE, FF, Ch) to get fresh data on every page load, clear the cache upon exit, and use CTRL-F5 to refresh. I’ve been bit in the undercarriage a few times by not going that route. 
V/r,