How to recover a dead WordPress site

I discovered this by accident and it worked! I had a blank white page on my local WP test site after installing a plugin or maybe another problem, who knows? I could not even login, as the admin pages were just stuck loading.

Any way if you append your base URL with this “wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true” it allows you to deactivate all plugins from the outside of admin. I did this and now my site is functional again. Of course you get the login screen first, to authenticate the call

Prior to this, I could not get past the login screen even to disable stuff in admin in the usual way.

The full url call looks like this on my machine. http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true

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