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rpk Profiles

Use rpk profiles to simplify your development experience using rpk with multiple Redpanda clusters by saving and reusing configurations for different clusters.

About rpk profiles

An rpk profile contains a reusable configuration for a Redpanda cluster. When running rpk, you can create a profile, configure it for a cluster you’re working with, and use it repeatably when running an rpk command for the cluster.

You can create different profiles for different Redpanda clusters. For example, your local cluster, development cluster, and production cluster can each have their own profile, with all of their information managed locally by rpk. You set a unique name for each profile.

A profile saves rpk-specific command properties. For details, see Specifying command properties.

All rpk commands can read configuration values from a profile. You pass a profile to an rpk command by setting the --profile flag. For example, the command rpk topic produce dev-topic --profile dev gets its configuration from the profile named dev.

Work with rpk profiles

The primary tasks for working with rpk profiles:

  • Create one or more profiles.

  • Choose the profile to use.

  • Edit or set default values across all profiles and values for a single profile.

  • Call an rpk command with a profile.

  • Delete unused profiles.

Create profile

To create a new profile, run rpk profile create:

rpk profile create <profile-name> [flags]

An rpk profile can be generated from different sources:

  • A redpanda.yaml file, using the --from-redpanda flag.

  • A different rpk profile, using the --from-profile flag.

  • A Redpanda Cloud cluster, using the --from-cloud flag.

You must provide a profile name when creating a profile that isn’t generated from a Redpanda Cloud cluster with the --from-cloud flag.

After the profile is created, rpk switches to the newly created profile.

You can specify the configuration during creation with the --set [key=value] flag. To simplify configuration, the --set flag supports autocompletion of valid keys, suggesting key names based on their -X format.

You should always use and set the --description flag to describe your profiles. The description is printed in the output of rpk profile list.

Created profiles are stored in an rpk.yaml file in a default local OS directory (for example, ~/.config/rpk/ for Linux and ~/Library/Application Support/rpk/ for MacOS). All profiles created by a developer are stored in the same rpk.yaml file.

Choose profile to use

With multiple created profiles, choose the profile to use with rpk profile use:

rpk profile use <name-of-profile-to-use>

Set or edit configuration values

You can configure settings that apply to all profiles. To set these globals:

You can customize settings for a single profile. To set a profile’s configuration:

  • Use rpk profile set to set key=value pairs of configuration options to write to the profile’s section of rpk.yaml.

  • Use rpk profile edit to edit the profile’s section of the rpk.yaml file in your default editor.

Customize command prompt per profile

A configurable field of an rpk profile is the prompt field. It enables the customization of the command prompt for a profile, so information about the in-use profile can be displayed within your command prompt.

The format string is intended for a PS1 prompt. For details on the prompt format string, see the rpk profile prompt reference.

The rpk profile prompt command prints the ANSI-escaped text of the prompt field for the in-use profile. You can call rpk profile prompt in your shell’s (rc) configuration file to assign your PS1.

For example, to customize your bash prompt for a dev rpk profile , first call rpk profile edit dev to set its prompt field:

name: dev
prompt: hi-red, "[%n]"

  • hi-red sets the text to high-intensity red

  • %n is a variable for the profile name

Then in .bashrc, set PS1 to include a call to rpk profile prompt:

export PS1='\u@\h\n$(rpk profile prompt)% '
When setting your PS1 variable, use single quotation marks and not double quotation marks, because double quotation marks aren’t reevaluated after every command.

The resulting prompt looks like this:

username@hostname[dev]%

Use profile with rpk command

An rpk command that can use a profile supports the --profile <profile-name> flag. When the --profile flag is set for an rpk command, the configuration for the cluster that rpk is interfacing with will be read from the named profile.

See the rpk commands reference for commands that support profiles.

Delete profile

To delete a profile, run rpk profile delete.

For details about all commands for rpk profiles, see the rpk profile reference page and its sub-pages.