Minimal Profiles

In Minimal, profiles are used to declare customizations such as additional packages, environment variables, or filesystem mappings. These customizations can then be easily applied to an environment, such as a task.

Defining a profile

Like packages, profiles are defined in a configuration file located at profiles/<profile name>/profile.ncl, either in your codebase or any layer above it in the software supply chain. The profiles/ directory is always adjacent to the minimal.toml file at the base of the layer, but can be omitted if the repository does not define any profiles.

Like packages, profiles are defined using Nickel:

let { profile, .. } = import "minimal.ncl" in
profile {
  name = "my-terraform-debug",

  env_vars.TF_LOG = "trace",
  packages = [
    # Make terraform package always present
    "terraform",
  ],
}

Using a profile

In all tasks

Setting defaults.profile within a codebase minimal.toml will apply the profile to all tasks which do not have a profile explicitly set.

[defaults]
profile = "my-profile" # my-profile is set on all tasks

On specific tasks

Profiles can be applied individually on tasks as well:

[tasks.shell]
profile = "my-profile"

Tasks which explicitly set a profile do not inherit any profile defined in [defaults]. Thus, a task can be configured to not use the default profile by setting profile = "".