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The HerdHelper Windows Service isn’t working

There are many reasons why Herd can’t write to your hosts file, sometimes it’s locked by anti virus software or is simply read-only. The HerdHelper tries to mitigate these situations automatically but can also write logs to track down the issue, so if the helper works and the status is green, please check these logs.

If the helper doesn’t start, please try starting it by changing the port or via your Windows Services or even by starting it manually at the following path:

%USERPROFILE%\.config\herd\bin\HerdHelper.exe

Starting it manually reveals a terminal window with logs and should help debugging the issue.

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The HerdHelper service is not installed

If the HerdHelper service is not installed, you can either install it by running the Herd installer again or by installing it manually. At first, you can double-check if the service is installed by running the following command via an elevated PowerShell:

sc.exe query HerdHelper

If the service is simply stopped, you can start it with the following command:

sc.exe start HerdHelper

In case, that you need to install it from scratch, you can do so by running the following command (please make sure to add your user directory there and escape any spaces or special characters):

sc.exe create HerdHelper binPath="C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\.config\herd\bin\HerdHelper.exe" start=auto

After that, you can start the service with the following command:

sc.exe start HerdHelper