Profiles

A profile is a named set of settings, used in addition to the settings which do not belong to a profile. Profiles build variants of an image from one image description, for example the same disk image for different virtualization platforms.

The settings used for a build with the QEMU profile.

Diagram description:: The image description contains settings without a profiles attribute and settings for the profiles VM, QEMU and VMWare. A build with --profile QEMU uses the settings without a profile, the settings of QEMU, and the settings of VM, which QEMU requires. The settings of VMWare are not used.

Profiles are declared with profile elements in the profiles section. Each profile has a name, used to select it, and a description for documentation purposes. Elements which support the profiles attribute, such as preferences, packages, repository or users, are only used for the profiles listed in it, comma-separated. A profile includes the settings of other profiles with requires elements:

<image schemaversion="8.5" name="kiwi-test-image-some">
    <profiles>
        <profile name="VM" description="virtual machine"/>
        <profile name="QEMU" description="virtual machine for QEMU">
            <requires profile="VM"/>
        </profile>
        <profile name="VMWare" description="virtual machine for VMWare">
            <requires profile="VM"/>
        </profile>
    </profiles>
    <preferences>
        <version>15.0</version>
        <packagemanager>zypper</packagemanager>
    </preferences>
    <preferences profiles="QEMU">
        <type image="oem" format="qcow2" filesystem="ext4"/>
    </preferences>
    <preferences profiles="VMWare">
        <type image="oem" format="vmdk" filesystem="ext4"/>
    </preferences>
</image>

The profile to build is selected on the command line with the global --profile option, which can be given multiple times. A profile with the attribute import="true" is used if no profile is selected. For details, see Building Images with Profiles.