Problems clearing cache

Question

I'm not sure how to explain what the problem is so I will go with a story:

I had a working local WordPress installation with a custom child theme. In the child theme, I had files like style.css, footer.php or index.pl - which I used to place my HTML and CSS.

To run it on a server I used the command php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 in my Mac terminal. Everything was working up to this point.

After committing my work, I saw that the folder of my child theme was misspelled "tweentyfifteen-child", so I renamed it "twentyfifteen-child" while the server was running. This made the site not render correctly.

Problem:

• I tried to revert all changes so I renamed folder back to "tweentyfifteen-child", but this didn't help. Main page still was not rendering any of my html.
• when I go to Theme editor I see that files like footer.php are not there, only css,
• I even deleted old database and created new one with the same name. Then downloaded clean copy of WordPress. And after setting database credentials in wp-config.php and running installation process, I can see Twenty Fifteen Child theme in WordPress CMS, even when there is no folder like that in wp_content/themes.

This left me with thinking that when I run php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 there must be some caching going on...

Help.

Answer 1

After more than a half of a day of battle, I found out that style.css has to be in direct subdirectory of a child theme. I had placed it under the /css/ folder together with other styles. That's why WordPress couldn't find PHP files... Weird thing is that this folder structure has worked when I was still developing site.