Can not start helix: Failed to initialize logging

[glennDittmann]

Summary

When trying to run helix I get:

Error: failed to initialize logging

Caused by:
    No such file or directory (os error 2)

Installed with brew on macOS. I also tried reinstalling, but the problem persists.

So it appears to me that some (log) files are missing. But wouldn't helix create them if there are none?
Thanks for any help in advance.

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx

I expected this to happen:

Helix starts running.

Instead, this happened:

Error: failed to initialize logging

Caused by:
    No such file or directory (os error 2)

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

please provide a copy of `~/.cache/helix/helix.log` here if possible, you may need to redact some of the lines

Platform

macOs

Terminal Emulator

Alacritty (with Zellij)

Helix Version

helix 23.05 (7f5940b)

[glennDittmann]

Okay manually creating a directory ~/.cache/helix with an empty helix.log resolved this. But still it seems that helix should have done that, right?

[the-mikedavis]

We do attempt to create the ~/.cache/helix directories if they don't exist:

helix/helix-loader/src/lib.rs

Lines 50 to 54 in d4f9716

	pub fn initialize_log_file(specified_file: Option<PathBuf>) {
	let log_file = specified_file.unwrap_or_else(default_log_file);
	ensure_parent_dir(&log_file);
	LOG_FILE.set(log_file).ok();
	}

Any errors are discarded though, so that probably failed with a permissions problem on the dir.

[glennDittmann]

Hmm yeah I thought so, that's weird; hard to reproduce. But thanks anyways :D

[nikaro]

I had the same issue, for whatever reason the ~/.cache and ~/.cache/helix folders had been created with root as owner.

Edit: maybe because the first thing i did was running helix as root to edit a system config 😅