Profiles & directories

What a profile is

A profile is a named assembly stored in the Harness home: it lists the bundles it layers, holds its own cordis.patch.yml override, and owns its independently installed plugins. Booting dsh --profile blue composes layers in this order:

1. The bundles, in the order the profile lists them (dsh-base is always the first layer: model adapters, tools, persistence, sandbox & approval policies, settings, credentials)
2. The profile's own cordis.patch.yml (inside the profile directory)
3. The home-level cordis.patch.yml ($DSH_HOME/cordis.patch.yml, machine-local global preferences)
4. --patch overlays (appended from the command line, repeatable)

A patch locates an entry by id and either replaces its entire config or inserts a new entry — upper layers always overwrite lower ones, which is the mechanical guarantee that every surface is customizable. The distribution ships web and headless as template profiles; installing Blue means placing the Blue bundle into your own profile (see Quickstart).

The most direct way to inspect the composition:

dsh --profile blue --dump-config     # print the actual assembled plugin tree

Directory layout

The DSH_HOME environment variable names the Harness home (default ~/.dsh):

Path	Contents
$DSH_HOME/profiles/<name>/	a profile: cordis.patch.yml, package.json, node_modules, … — a self-contained pnpm workspace
$DSH_HOME/sessions/	session persistence (JSONL event logs powering --resume and cross-interface restore)
$DSH_HOME/storages/	per-plugin storage areas
$DSH_HOME/skills/	user-level skills (see Skills)
$DSH_HOME/cordis.patch.yml	the home-level global patch overlay
$DSH_HOME/attachments/	the attachment store (Blue's default location; relocatable via DSH_BLUE_ATTACHMENT_DIR)

A profile is a pnpm workspace

dsh plugin --profile <name> add <pkg> forwards verbatim to pnpm inside the profile directory — so:

• local checkouts install via the link: protocol during development (Blue's quickstart links its five packages exactly this way);
• only dependency-graph changes need another add/install — code changes just need a rebuild;
• done with a profile? Delete $DSH_HOME/profiles/<name>/ — it's self-contained with no global residue.