logging into development instance of Drupal Ive rsynced the directory structure from mywebsite.com to mywebsite.local ( on my LAN) 
and copied the DB . 
the website mywebsite.local displays the website, but i cant log with the admin user/pw from the production site . 
The DB tables look the same to me.  Its a single site and in sites/default/settings.php it points to DB host is 'localhost'
Tailing apache access.log and I can see the .local site is served from localhost 

Do I need to change anything else  ?
You can try login with https://drushcommands.com/drush-8x/user/user-login/

drush uli admin


Which will give you a login link for user admin

If you invoke it without a username it gives you a login link for user 1

drush uli