How to move a https website back to dev and access the admin?

Question

I have a live WP site that uses https, when I move it back to a dev server that's http only I can't access the admin because it get's redirected to https. This only happens when I try to use the admin. Everything works fine in the front end.

So let's say I go to mydevsite.com/wp-admin. I get automatically redirect to https://mydevsite.com/wp-admin. What I am trying to find out is what's causing the browser to redirect my domain to a https. It's clearly something that remained from the live site. I just don't know what.

My troubleshooting:

My first guess is that I needed to update my .htacess file, but the file contains the default wordpress info only:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I also checked functions.php to see if there was anything going on there, but I see nothing related to https.

I also checked the database and did a search for https. I have not found any entries that relate to my website. I specifically checked the options table. No https references there.

I also cleaned transients just in case.

What are other things that I should check?

Answer 1

Two things to try:

1 check that your wp-config.php file contains the following:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', false);

2 if you're in a dev environment, then use wp-cli to run this:

wp search-replace 'https://example.com' 'http://example.com' --skip-columns=guid