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A profile is a committed dump of your workspace — your brands, personas, references, templates, and (optionally) renders — packaged under profiles/<your-nick>/ for sharing via PR. The model is “portable identity”: the brand voice you tuned, the personas you built, the reference plates you locked, the templates you extracted from your wins, all bundled in one folder that other Ralphy users can clone, import, and extend. Profiles are how the community grows; they’re also how you carry your setup between machines without losing the master shots.

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What lives in a profile

profiles/<nickname>/ mirrors the layout of workspace/ but selectively. The export defaults skip renders and intermediate video clips because those are heavy and rarely useful to a recipient. You can include them with a flag if you want a fully-reproducible PR.
FolderIn default export?Notes
brands/YesLogo, palette, tone, default persona pointer
personas/YesArchetype, voice id, master shot
references/YesPulled URLs, design tokens, blueprints
templates/YesWorkspace-local templates you extracted
projects/Yes (metadata + scenarios + manifests)Logs and .json files; renders stripped by default
projects/*/render/No (default)Final mp4s. Add with --include-renders.
projects/*/assets/*.mp4No (default)Intermediate video clips. Add with --include-videos.
.ralph/asset-cache/NoAuto-pulls from ralphy-assets companion repo on import
The reasoning: most of what makes a profile useful (the persona master shot, the brand tone, the template you tuned) weighs kilobytes. The renders and intermediate clips weigh megabytes-to-gigabytes and the recipient can re-render from the manifest. Heavy by default would make PRs unreviewable.

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Exporting

ralphy profile export alex \
  --include-renders \
  --dry-run
The dry-run prints exactly what would be copied without writing. Drop --dry-run to actually copy workspace/ → profiles/alex/ and commit the result to git. The export is non-destructive — your workspace stays as it is.
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<nickname>
string
required
Your nick. Becomes the folder name under profiles/.
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--include-renders
boolean
Include render/final.mp4 and other render outputs. Heavy; opt in.
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--include-videos
boolean
Include every .mp4 and .mov under projects. Heaviest; opt in only for full repro packs.
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--dry-run
boolean
Print what would be copied; do not write.
The exported folder also gets a PROFILE.md summarizing what’s inside — brand count, persona count, template count, project count with statuses. Read it with ralphy profile show <nick>.

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Importing someone else’s profile

ralphy profile import alex
The import is additive by default. It merges profiles/alex/ into your local workspace/, but it will not overwrite files that already exist locally. Collisions get skipped with a stderr warning so you can resolve them by hand. The registry (the central index of brands, personas, projects) gets merged too — every entity in the imported profile shows up in your ralphy brand list, ralphy persona list, and so on.
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<nickname>
string
required
The nick under profiles/ to import from.
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--overwrite
boolean
Replace existing local files instead of skipping. Use when you want a hard reset to someone else’s setup.
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--dry-run
boolean
Print what would be copied; do not write.
--overwrite is destructive. It violates the usual append-only contract because you’ve asked for it explicitly. Run with --dry-run first and confirm the file list before re-running for real.

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Listing and inspecting

ralphy profile list -p

┌──────────┬──────────┬─────────┬────────────┐
│ nickname │ brands   │ persons │ templates  │
├──────────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────────┤
│ alex     │ 3        │ 5       │ 7          │
│ kate     │ 1        │ 2       │ 12         │
│ pavel    │ 4        │ 8       │ 3          │
└──────────┴──────────┴─────────┴────────────┘
ralphy profile show <nick> prints the profile’s PROFILE.md so you can read the description before importing.

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Sharing via PR

The whole point of profiles/ being a committed folder is that it travels through git. Typical share workflow:
  1. ralphy profile export <your-nick> to land everything under profiles/<your-nick>/.
  2. Review the diff. Check that no .env, no API keys, no PII slipped in. (The export is selective about .env files, but a manual sanity check costs nothing.)
  3. git add profiles/<your-nick>/ and commit.
  4. Push and open a PR on the ugc-cli repo.
  5. Once merged, other users can git pull and ralphy profile import <your-nick> to grab your setup.
Profiles intentionally do not vendor heavy assets — those live in the ralphy-assets companion repo, which Ralphy auto-pulls on import via the SHA-256-verified asset cache at workspace/.ralph/asset-cache/. Your PR stays small; the heavy assets stay where they belong.

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Why profiles exist

Three reasons, in order of how often each one bites:
  • Portability between machines. You set up Ralphy on your laptop, you tuned a persona for three months, the laptop dies. Without a profile, you’d start from scratch. With a profile committed to your fork of ugc-cli, you git pull and ralphy profile import <your-nick> on the new machine and you’re back.
  • Team sharing. Two creators on the same team share a brand and a persona. One exports a profile; the other imports it. Both teammates’ projects pick up the brand’s palette and tone without retyping.
  • Community templates with provenance. When you extract a template from a successful project (ralphy template create --from-project <id>), the template lives under workspace/templates/. Bundle it into your profile and the community can import your workflow with the master shots intact — not just the template definition. That’s why the showcase projects under ralphy-assets ship as profiles, not just templates.

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What profiles are not

A profile is not a backup tool. It captures the durable parts of your workspace — the entities you’d want to recreate. It does not capture in-flight renders, daemon job queues, or local-only scratch files. For real backup, use whatever you use for the rest of your dotfiles. A profile is also not a permission grant. Importing someone’s profile gives you their brand and persona definitions, not their API keys. You need your own OPENROUTER_API_KEY and ELEVENLABS_API_KEY to actually generate anything (see Setup and doctor).