Indigo Start Up/Restart Scenarios

Since Indigo is a Client/Server system, there are several different ways to have it start up.

First, if you're only doing basic light automation and don't plan on keeping your Mac running (uploading to either an 1132CU or 2414U), then you'll really only want the server to be running when the Mac client is running. In this scenario, you'll want to select the Run client/server as single application radio button in the Start Local Server dialog box. So, the server is only controlling your automation logic while the Mac client is running. When you quit the Mac client, the server will upload what it can to the controller (if possible) and then quit as well. NOTE: advanced automation, Indigo Touch, and web access aren't available in this configuration.

The second scenario is when you want to have the server controlling your logic all the time. This enables advanced automation (like more flexible scheduling/triggering, application integration (Pro only), and remote application access (Indigo Touch and web access). To enable this mode, you'd select Start and connect to Indigo Server on this computer radio button in the Start Local Server dialog box. When you select that, several more options open up - the one that's important to this discussion is Auto start Indigo Server on user login. Checking this option will have the server automatically start up when the current user account logs in, and, as it implies, will restart the server if it crashes for some reason. You can set your Mac to automatically log in to a specific user account at boot time in the Users & Groups system preference pane under Login Options.

For those of you that are experienced Unix/Mac users, you're next thought may be: I want the server to start when my system boots regardless of whether a user is logged in or not. Indigo doesn't support this ability out of the box, for several reasons. One is that part of Indigo's power is it's ability to be scripted using AppleScript and to integrate with other applications. If the server were to run as a system daemon (in the background regardless of user account), it wouldn't be able to reliably communicate with other software. AppleEvents (and, therefore, AppleScripts) usually target user-level applications. If no user account is logged in, then those scripts wouldn't work.

However, there have been some users who have tried and successfully (with some limitations) gotten the server to run as a system daemon. For the moment, you can read about it on the user forums. Please note: while we appreciate everyone's work in getting this scenario running, it isn't “officially” supported for a variety of reasons. Any help in getting it running or keeping it running will have to come from other forum members. Also, we make no guarantee that future versions of the server will run in this scenario. It's also a bit tricky to get set up, so you really should be familiar with the Unix underpinnings of your Mac…