Profiles

A product has one spec and many places to run it. One customer runs it on Proxmox without internet, another on AWS in their own region, a third on local VMs with a bigger web server. Without profiles, those differences end up in forks of the spec or in lists of -s overrides kept somewhere else. A profile is one file per customer or site, kept with the project, that says only what differs.

Profiles arrive in the next release.

A profile

Profiles live in profiles/<name>.yml next to isoloom.yml. The name is kebab-case.

# profiles/bank-fr.yml
description: Bank, Paris site
target: proxmox
spec:
  networks: { lan: { internet: false } }
  machines: { web: { resources: { cpus: 4, memory_mb: 8192 } } }
defaults:
  images: { os: { debian-12: { proxmox: local:iso/debian-12-bank.qcow2 } } }
inputs:
  REGISTRY: registry.bank.local

Field	What it does
`description`	Shown by `isoloom profiles`.
`target`	The target this profile runs on. It is the default when no target is given, and asking for another one is an error.
`spec`	Values merged into the spec, leaf by leaf, before any `-s` override.
`defaults`	A layer of defaults, between the project's file and `--images`. `isoloom defaults` names the profile as the source of what it sets.
`inputs`	Values for the spec's launch-time inputs. An input already set in the environment wins.

Every field is optional. Unknown fields are errors.

Using one

Every command takes --profile <name>, or reads ISOLOOM_PROFILE:

isoloom generate --profile bank-fr     # only proxmox, the target it pins
isoloom run --profile bank-fr
isoloom defaults --profile bank-fr     # what wins, and which layer set it
ISOLOOM_PROFILE=bank-fr isoloom test

isoloom run records the profile with the running environment, and isoloom status shows it in brackets after the target.

Order

For the spec: the spec's own values, then the profile's spec, then -s.

For the defaults: built in, your file, the project's file, the profile, --images, the environment, then -s defaults.<key>.

Checked against the spec

A profile names only what the spec has. A machine, network or input the spec lacks is an error, so renaming a machine can't leave a profile silently doing nothing.

isoloom profiles lists the project's profiles and checks each one: the names it uses, the spec it makes, and that its target can run that spec. It exits non-zero when one fails, so a single CI step covers every customer and site.

$ isoloom profiles
✓ bank-fr   proxmox         Bank, Paris site
✗ retail    vagrant         Retail, Lyon
    profile `retail`: `spec.machines.wbe`: the spec has no machine `wbe`

--json prints each profile with its name, target, description, ok and problems.