Image Profiles

A profile is a namespace for additional settings that can be applied by KIWI NG on top of the default settings (or other profiles), thereby allowing to build multiple appliances with the same build type but with different configurations.

The use of profiles is advisable to distinguish image builds of the same type but with different settings. In the following example, two virtual machine images of the oem type are configured: one for QEMU (using the qcow2 format) and one for VMWare (using the vmdk format).

<image schemaversion="7.4" name="{exc_image_base_name}">
    <profiles>
        <profile name="QEMU" description="virtual machine for QEMU"/>
        <profile name="VMWare" description="virtual machine for VMWare"/>
    </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>

Each profile is declared via the element profile, which itself must be a child of profiles and must contain the name and description attributes. The description is only present for documentation purposes, name on the other hand is used to instruct KIWI NG which profile to build via the command line. Additionally, one can provide the boolean attribute import, which defines whether this profile should be used by default when KIWI NG is invoked via the command line.

A profile inherits the default settings which do not belong to any profile. It applies only to elements that contain the profile in their profiles attribute. The attribute profiles expects a comma separated list of profiles for which the settings of this element apply.

Profiles can furthermore inherit settings from another profile via the requires sub-element:

<profiles>
    <profile name="VM" description="virtual machine"/>
    <profile name="QEMU" description="virtual machine for QEMU">
        <requires profile="VM"/>
    </profile>
</profiles>

The profile QEMU would inherit the settings from VM in the above example.

For further details on the usage of profiles see Building Images with Profiles