If you build WordPress sites in Local, you already know the two small frictions that never quite go away. Local sites quietly balloon in size — caches, transients, post revisions, an uploads folder that never shrinks — and every time you need to debug something you’re back in wp-config.php flipping WP_DEBUG on, then digging through wp-content/debug.log by hand, then remembering to turn it all off again.

Local Dev Toolkit is a free add-on that puts both of those jobs one click away, per site, right inside Local.

Two tabs, no configuration

Once installed, it adds a Dev Toolkit item to any site’s Tools menu. There’s nothing to set up — it works against whichever site you’re viewing.

Cleanup

The Cleanup tab opens with a live disk-usage breakdown: total site size, plus uploads, database, cache, and debug.log broken out separately, so you can see at a glance where the space actually went.

Below that is a set of one-click tidy actions, each reporting exactly what it did:

  • Clear all transients (or just the expired ones)
  • Flush the object cache
  • Delete post revisions
  • Empty the post trash
  • Delete spam comments
  • Optimize the database

These are the same things you’d normally do by hand with a string of WP-CLI commands — now they’re buttons, and you get a count of what was removed.

Debug & Logs

The Debug tab turns the usual wp-config.php dance into toggles. Flip WP_DEBUG, WP_DEBUG_LOG, WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY, SCRIPT_DEBUG, or SAVEQUERIES on and off — the changes are written safely via wp config set, so there’s no hand-editing and no risk of fat-fingering a constant.

From the same tab you can install and activate Query Monitor in one click, and read your debug.log inline — it tails the last 128 KB and gives you a Clear button when it’s served its purpose.

How it works

Under the hood it leans on tools Local already ships. Every action routes through Local’s bundled WP-CLI against the selected site, and the disk and log readouts come straight from the site’s files. That keeps the add-on small and means it behaves exactly like the commands you’d run yourself — no magic, no separate database, nothing phoning home.

A couple of practical notes: the site needs to be running for anything that touches the database (the cleanup actions, DB size, and the Query Monitor install). The disk sizes, the debug-constant toggles, and the log viewer all work whether the site is running or stopped.

Get it

Local Dev Toolkit is open source and free on GitHub:

github.com/dhanendran/local-dev-toolkit

Clone it into Local’s add-ons folder, run yarn install && yarn build, restart Local, and you’ll find Dev Toolkit under any site’s Tools menu.