OK, here are some results!
It turns out this user's computer is...um...configured very oddly. It's possible something got messed up on it in ancient times. We'll call the expected user name UserRight, and the surprise other user name that showed up UserWrong. IndigoHelper was running as root (expected), while everything else was running as...UserWrong, despite the current logged in user being UserRight. Furthermore, in System Settings, UserWrong did not exist as another user. Reinstalling the helper did not change the situation.
Ultimately, this SuperUser post, the answer of which is quoted at the bottom of this post, describes the issue to a T, and it is an issue with the computer setup, not Indigo itself, I'd argue. I could even replicate the same symptoms in terminal as the SuperUser question asker. (Although somehow it definitely can do things in /Users/UserRight/.indigo, and why it can reference the correct place sometimes and the wrong place other times is an unknown to me and may be worth looking into.) Basically, the "short name" for the current user on the machine (UserWrong in this case) did not match the username (UserRight). So, Indigo successfully created a .indigo folder in /Users/UserRight/.indigo, but then whenever it (or IndigoHelper?) wanted to reference said folder, it looked in /Users/UserWrong/.indigo, which didn't exist and never did exist. Fixing the root cause looked like a pain, especially when fixing another person's computer was not the point of my meeting with this user, and the linked help posts from said SuperUser posts were quite old.
As a hackfix, I did:
ln -s /Users/UserRight/.indigo /Users/UserWrong/.indigo
to make a symbolic link from the place Indigo was looking to the place Indigo was not looking. This, ultimately, made Indigo work as one would expect, and it was smooth sailing from there in terms of Indigo's functionality.
So, I think my takeaways are (repeating something I emailed before so it's in the public archive as well as a thought):
- This ultimately is probably not an issue with Indigo; however, I do wonder why sometimes
/Users/UserRight/.indigo was successfully accessed and used (e.g. for stacks), and other times /Users/UserWrong/.indigo was used by Indigo itself (e.g. for hosts). Ultimately, however, this seems like a very odd user configuration mishap.
- Internally, myself and Indigo's software programmer shared some emails that the "hosts folder not found" error is actually a very unhelpful Swift error not caused by Indigo itself.
- An button (or buttons) in settings/preferences to take you to log locations would be helpful 😄
- I was not able to take the time to do all the full suggested steps once I realized it was a deeper, underlying problem.
In any case, thanks for working with me on this!! Hopefully having this all documented in a forum post here will help someone down the line. Again, appreciate this software very much. Once it was up and running, the user I was helping was very happy with its ability to set up multiple websites with a single database engine using one piece of software.
Original SuperUser post answer copied here for historical purposes:
It seems that the short name and the username on your Mac do not match. To test this just type id and echo ~ to confirm that the Mac is fine, but the short name and home folder are not to your liking. Apple has an official procedure to fix this at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1428 and we have several questions here that also cover the topic when people have found that HT1428 didn't work for them.
There are several procedures to edit the short name but they're all a pain. Furthermore, they often don't clean everything up correctly and traces of the old name you didn't like will remain on the system in folders and lists. Your best bet is to go into the users preference and create a new admin user with a password that you know.
Then you can follow the steps on this other answer here to delete and re-create your account with all of your files intact and the correct short name that you prefer. You will find that you prompt now matches the short name that you like. Before starting this process, you might make a good backup if your system just in case you make a mistake of my instructions are not clear or if the computer just crashes at the wrong time.
