Profile Distributions: Share a Whole Agent

A profile distribution packages a complete Hermes agent — personality, skills, cron jobs, MCP connections, config — as a git repository. Anyone with access to the repo can install the whole agent with one command, update it in place, and keep their own memories, sessions, and API keys untouched.

If a profile is a local agent, a distribution is that agent made shareable.

Hermes has two sharing paths, and they answer different questions. Distributions are the durable one; export files are the quick one.

Pick a distribution when the agent is a product you'll keep improving and other people should track: a team's reviewed internal agent, a community release, the same agent deployed to five machines.

Pick an export file when you just want someone to have your setup right now, or you're moving to a new laptop. No repo, no manifest — run /export in chat, hand over the file, they run /import. See Export and import a profile file ↗.

The two aren't exclusive. Plenty of authors dogfood a profile, /export it to a colleague for a second opinion, then publish it as a distribution once it's worth versioning.

Before distributions, sharing a Hermes agent meant sending someone:

1. Your SOUL.md
2. A list of skills to install
3. Your config.yaml, minus the secrets
4. A description of which MCP servers you wired up
5. Any cron jobs you scheduled
6. Instructions for which env vars to set

…and hoping they assembled it correctly. Every version bump or bug fix meant repeating the handoff.

With distributions, all of that lives in one git repo:

my-research-agent/
├── distribution.yaml    # manifest: name, version, env-var requirements
├── SOUL.md              # the agent's personality / system prompt
├── config.yaml          # model, temperature, reasoning, tool defaults
├── skills/              # bundled skills that come with the agent
├── cron/                # scheduled tasks the agent runs
└── mcp.json             # MCP servers the agent connects to

Recipients run:

hermes profile install github.com/you/my-research-agent --alias

…and they now have the whole agent. They fill in their own API keys (.env.EXAMPLE → .env), and they can run my-research-agent chat or address it through Telegram / Discord / Slack / any gateway platform. When you push a new version, they run hermes profile update my-research-agent and pull your changes — their memories and sessions stay put.

We considered tarballs, HTTP archives, a custom format. None of them beat git:

• Zero build step for authors. Push to GitHub; consumers install. There's no "pack this, upload that, update the index" loop.
• Tags, branches, and commits are already the versioning system. A tag push does for us what "pack + upload a release" does for other tools.
• Updates are a fetch. Not a re-download of the whole archive.
• Transparent. Users can browse the repo, read diffs between versions, open issues against it, fork it to customize.
• Private repos work for free. SSH keys, git credential helpers, GitHub CLI stored credentials — whatever auth your terminal is already set up for applies transparently.
• Reproducibility is a commit SHA. The same thing pip and npm record.

The tradeoff: recipients need git installed. On any machine running Hermes in 2026, that's already true.

Good fits:

• You're sharing a specialized agent — a compliance monitor, a code reviewer, a research assistant, a customer-support bot — with a team or with the community.
• You're deploying the same agent to multiple machines and don't want to copy files manually each time.
• You're iterating on an agent and want recipients to pick up new versions with one command.
• You're building an agent as a product — opinionated defaults, curated skills, tuned prompts — that other people should use as a starting point.

Not a fit:

• You want to hand someone your setup once, right now. A distribution needs a repo, a manifest, and a .gitignore. /export needs none of that — see Export and import a profile file ↗. Same for backing up or moving a profile to a new machine.
• You want to share your desktop theme and layout. A distribution carries the agent — SOUL, config, skills, cron, MCP, plugins. An export made from the desktop app also carries the look: skin, light/dark mode, custom themes, rail color, and window layout.
• You want to share API keys alongside the agent. auth.json and .env are deliberately excluded from distributions. Each installer brings their own credentials. (Export files strip them too.)
• You want to share memories / sessions / conversation history. Those are user data, not distribution content. Never shipped. (Export files are different here — read what an export contains ↗ before sending one.)

Below is the full end-to-end flow. Pick the side you care about.

---

Step 1 — Start from a working profile

Build and refine the agent like any other profile:

hermes profile create research-bot
research-bot setup                    # configure model, API keys
# Edit ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/SOUL.md
# Install skills, wire up MCP servers, schedule cron jobs, etc.
research-bot chat                     # dogfood until it feels right

Step 2 — Add a distribution.yaml

Create ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/distribution.yaml:

name: research-bot
version: 1.0.0
description: "Autonomous research assistant with arXiv and web tools"
hermes_requires: ">=0.12.0"
author: "Your Name"
license: "MIT"

# Tell installers which env vars the agent needs. These are checked against
# the installer's shell and existing .env file so they don't get nagged
# about keys they already have configured.
env_requires:
  - name: OPENAI_API_KEY
    description: "OpenAI API key (for model access)"
    required: true
  - name: SERPAPI_KEY
    description: "SerpAPI key for web search"
    required: false
    default: ""

That's the whole manifest. Every field except name has a sensible default.

Step 3 — Create a .gitignore before the first commit

Create ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/.gitignore with at minimum:

# Credentials & secrets — NEVER commit
auth.json
.env
.env.EXAMPLE    # generated by install, not authorship domain

# Runtime databases & state
state.db
state.db-shm
state.db-wal
hermes_state.db
response_store.db
response_store.db-shm
response_store.db-wal
gateway.pid
gateway_state.json
processes.json
auth.lock
active_profile
.update_check

# User data — NEVER commit
memories/
sessions/
logs/
plans/
workspace/
home/

# Caches & generated artifacts
image_cache/
audio_cache/
document_cache/
browser_screenshots/
cache/

# Infrastructure (should not be in profile dir, but safe to exclude)
hermes-agent/
.worktrees/
profiles/
bin/
node_modules/

# User customization namespace — your local overrides
local/

# Checkpoints & backups (can be huge)
checkpoints/
sandboxes/
backups/

# Logs
errors.log
.hermes_history

This mirrors the hard-excluded paths ↗ that the installer strips on its end. Anything else you want to keep out of the repo (scratch files, large assets, local-only skills) should also go in here.

Step 4 — Push to a git repo

cd ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot
git init
git add .
git commit -m "v1.0.0"
git remote add origin git@github.com:you/research-bot.git
git tag v1.0.0
git push -u origin main --tags

The repo is now a distribution. Anyone with access can install it.

Step 5 — Tag versioned releases

Every time the agent reaches a stable point, bump the version and tag:

# Edit distribution.yaml: version: 1.1.0
git add distribution.yaml SOUL.md skills/
git commit -m "v1.1.0: tighter research SOUL, add arxiv skill"
git tag v1.1.0
git push --tags

Recipients who run hermes profile update research-bot will pull the latest.

What the repo looks like

A complete authored distribution:

research-bot/
├── .gitignore                   # excludes secrets & user data (see Step 3)
├── distribution.yaml            # required
├── SOUL.md                      # strongly recommended
├── config.yaml                  # model, provider, tool defaults
├── mcp.json                     # MCP server connections
├── skills/
│   ├── arxiv-search/SKILL.md
│   ├── paper-summarization/SKILL.md
│   └── citation-lookup/SKILL.md
├── cron/
│   └── weekly-digest.json       # scheduled tasks
└── README.md                    # human-facing description (optional)

Distribution-owned vs user-owned

When an installer updates to a new version, some things get replaced (author's domain) and some things stay put (installer's domain). Defaults:

You can override the distribution-owned list in the manifest:

distribution_owned:
  - SOUL.md
  - skills/research/            # only my research skills; other installed skills stay
  - cron/digest.json

When omitted, the defaults above apply — which is what most distributions want.

---

Install

hermes profile install github.com/you/research-bot --alias

What happens:

1. Clones the repo into a temporary directory.
2. Reads distribution.yaml, shows you the manifest (name, version, description, author, required env vars).
3. Checks each required env var against your shell environment and the target profile's existing .env. Marks each as ✓ set or needs setting so you know exactly what to configure.
4. Asks for confirmation. Pass -y / --yes to skip.
5. Copies distribution-owned files into ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/ (or wherever the manifest's name resolves). The hard-excluded paths ↗ are stripped during this copy, even if the author accidentally left them in the repo.
6. Writes .env.EXAMPLE with the required keys commented out — copy to .env and fill in.
7. With --alias, creates a wrapper so you can run research-bot chat directly.

Source types

Any git URL works:

# GitHub shorthand
hermes profile install github.com/you/research-bot

# Full HTTPS
hermes profile install https://github.com/you/research-bot.git

# SSH
hermes profile install git@github.com:you/research-bot.git

# Self-hosted, GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo — any Git host
hermes profile install https://git.example.com/team/research-bot.git

# Private repo using your configured git auth
hermes profile install git@github.com:your-org/internal-bot.git

# Local directory during development (no git push needed)
hermes profile install ~/my-profile-in-progress/

Override the profile name

Two users wanting the same distribution under different profile names:

# Alice
hermes profile install github.com/acme/support-bot --name support-us --alias
# Bob (same distribution, different local name)
hermes profile install github.com/acme/support-bot --name support-eu --alias

Fill in env vars

After install, the agent's profile contains a .env.EXAMPLE:

# Environment variables required by this Hermes distribution.
# Copy to `.env` and fill in your own values before running.

# OpenAI API key (for model access)
# (required)
OPENAI_API_KEY=

# SerpAPI key for web search
# (optional)
# SERPAPI_KEY=

Copy it:

cp ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/.env.EXAMPLE ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/.env
# Edit .env, paste your real keys

Required keys that were already in your shell environment (e.g. OPENAI_API_KEY exported in your ~/.zshrc) are marked ✓ set during install — you don't need to duplicate them in .env.

Check what you installed

hermes profile info research-bot

Shows:

Distribution: research-bot
Version:      1.0.0
Description:  Autonomous research assistant with arXiv and web tools
Author:       Your Name
Requires:     Hermes >=0.12.0
Source:       https://github.com/you/research-bot
Installed:    2026-05-08T17:04:32+00:00

Environment variables:
  OPENAI_API_KEY (required) — OpenAI API key (for model access)
  SERPAPI_KEY (optional) — SerpAPI key for web search

hermes profile list also shows a Distribution column so at a glance you can see which of your profiles came from repos and which you hand-built:

 Profile          Model                        Gateway      Alias        Distribution
 ───────────────    ───────────────────────────    ───────────    ───────────    ────────────────────
 ◆default         claude-sonnet-4              stopped      —            —
  coder           gpt-5                        stopped      coder        —
  research-bot    claude-opus-4                stopped      research-bot research-bot@1.0.0
  telemetry       claude-sonnet-4              running      telemetry    telemetry@2.3.1

Update

hermes profile update research-bot

What happens:

1. Re-clones the repo from the recorded source URL.
2. Replaces distribution-owned files (SOUL, skills, cron, mcp.json).
3. Preserves your config.yaml — you may have tuned the model, temperature, or other settings. Pass --force-config to overwrite.
4. Never touches user data: memories, sessions, auth, .env, logs, state.

No re-downloading the whole archive. No stomping your local changes to config. No deleting your conversation history.

Remove

hermes profile delete research-bot

The delete prompt surfaces distribution info before asking you to confirm:

Profile: research-bot
Path:    ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot
Model:   claude-opus-4 (anthropic)
Skills:  12
Distribution: research-bot@1.0.0
Installed from: https://github.com/you/research-bot

This will permanently delete:
  • All config, API keys, memories, sessions, skills, cron jobs
  • Command alias (~/.local/bin/research-bot)

Type 'research-bot' to confirm:

So you never accidentally delete an agent without knowing where it came from or being able to re-install it.

---

Personal: sync one agent across machines

You built a research assistant on your laptop. You want the same agent on your workstation.

# Laptop — create .gitignore first (see "For authors" Step 3), then:
cd ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot
git init && git add . && git status   # confirm no secrets staged
git commit -m "initial"
git remote add origin git@github.com:you/research-bot.git
git push -u origin main

# Workstation
hermes profile install github.com/you/research-bot --alias
# Fill in .env. Done.

Any iteration on the laptop (git commit && push) pulls onto the workstation with hermes profile update research-bot. Memories stay per-machine — the laptop remembers its own conversations, the workstation remembers its own, they don't collide.

Team: ship a reviewed internal agent

Your engineering team wants a shared PR-review bot with a specific SOUL, specific skills, and a cron that runs every PR through it.

# Engineering lead — create .gitignore first (see "For authors" Step 3), then:
cd ~/.hermes/profiles/pr-reviewer
# ... build and tune ...
git init && git add . && git status   # confirm no secrets staged
git commit -m "v1.0 PR reviewer"
git tag v1.0.0
git push -u origin main --tags    # push to your company's internal Git host

# Each engineer
hermes profile install git@github.com:your-org/pr-reviewer.git --alias
# Fill in .env with their own API key (billed to them), .env.EXAMPLE points at what's required
pr-reviewer chat

When the lead ships v1.1 (better SOUL, new skill), engineers run hermes profile update pr-reviewer and everyone's on the new version within minutes.

Community: publish a public agent

You built something novel — maybe a "Polymarket trader" or an "academic paper summarizer" or a "Minecraft server ops assistant." You want to share it.

# You — create .gitignore first (see "For authors" Step 3), then:
cd ~/.hermes/profiles/polymarket-trader
# Write a solid README.md at the repo root — GitHub shows it on the repo page
git init && git add . && git status   # confirm no secrets staged
git commit -m "v1.0"
git tag v1.0.0
# Publish to a public GitHub repo
git remote add origin https://github.com/you/hermes-polymarket-trader.git
git push -u origin main --tags

# Anyone
hermes profile install github.com/you/hermes-polymarket-trader --alias

Tweet the install command. People who try it send you issues and PRs. If someone wants to customize, they fork — same git workflow everyone already knows.

Product: ship an opinionated agent

You built Hermes-on-top — maybe a compliance-monitoring harness, a customer-support stack, a domain-specific research platform. You want to distribute it as a product.

# distribution.yaml
name: telemetry-harness
version: 2.3.1
description: "Compliance telemetry harness — monitors and reviews regulated workflows"
hermes_requires: ">=0.13.0"
author: "Acme Compliance Inc."
license: "Commercial"

env_requires:
  - name: ACME_API_KEY
    description: "Your Acme Compliance license key (email support@acme.com)"
    required: true
  - name: OPENAI_API_KEY
    description: "OpenAI API key for model access"
    required: true
  - name: GRAPHITI_MCP_URL
    description: "URL for your Graphiti knowledge graph instance"
    required: false
    default: "http://127.0.0.1:8000/sse"

Your customers install via a single command; the install preview tells them exactly which keys to have ready; updates roll out the moment you tag a new release; their compliance data (memories/, sessions/) never leaves their machine.

Ephemeral: one-off scripts on shared infra

You're the ops lead. You want a temporary agent that diagnoses a production incident — a canned SOUL with the right tools and MCP connections — and runs on three on-call engineers' laptops for the next week.

# You — create .gitignore first (see "For authors" Step 3), then:
# Build the profile, commit, push a private repo
git push -u origin main

# Each on-call
hermes profile install git@github.com:your-org/incident-2026-q2.git --alias

# Incident resolved — tear it down
hermes profile delete incident-2026-q2

The install-delete cycle is cheap enough to be disposable.

---

Pin to a specific version

Check what version you're on vs. latest

# Your installed version
hermes profile info research-bot | grep Version

# Latest upstream (without installing)
git ls-remote --tags https://github.com/you/research-bot | tail -5

Keep local config customizations through updates

The default update behavior already does this: config.yaml is preserved. To be safe, write your local tweaks to a file the distribution doesn't own:

# ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot/local/my-overrides.yaml
# (distribution never touches local/)

…and reference it from config.yaml or your SOUL as needed.

Force a clean re-install

# Nuke and re-install from scratch (loses memories/sessions too)
hermes profile delete research-bot --yes
hermes profile install github.com/you/research-bot --alias

# Update to current main but reset config.yaml to the distribution's default
hermes profile update research-bot --force-config --yes

Fork and customize

The standard git workflow — distributions are just repos:

# Fork the repo on GitHub, then install your fork
hermes profile install github.com/yourname/forked-research-bot --alias

# Iterate locally in ~/.hermes/profiles/forked-research-bot/
# Edit SOUL.md, commit, push to your fork
# Upstream changes: pull them into your fork the usual way

Test a distribution before pushing

From the author's machine:

# Install from a local directory (no git push needed)
hermes profile install ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot --name research-bot-test --alias

# Tweak, delete, re-install until it's right
hermes profile delete research-bot-test --yes
hermes profile install ~/.hermes/profiles/research-bot --name research-bot-test

---

When you don't need versioning, skip the repo. /export packs a profile into a single .tar.gz; /import unpacks it as a new profile on the other end. Credentials are stripped on the way out.

Export

In the CLI, TUI, or desktop chat:

/export                          # the active profile → <name>.tar.gz
/export research-bot             # a named profile
/export research-bot -o ~/Desktop/research-bot.tar.gz

Or from a shell, same machinery:

hermes profile export research-bot
hermes profile export research-bot -o ./research-bot.tar.gz

In the desktop app there are three doors, all landing on a native save dialog:

• ⌘K → Export profile…
• Right-click a profile square in the sidebar rail → Export profile…
• The import button beside the rail's + covers the other direction

A desktop export adds one extra file the CLI doesn't: desktop.json, carrying your skin, light/dark mode, any custom theme definitions the skin needs, the profile's rail color, and your window layout. That's why a profile shared from the desktop arrives looking like yours, not just behaving like yours.

Import

/import ~/Downloads/research-bot.tar.gz
/import ~/Downloads/research-bot.tar.gz --name research-bot-2

hermes profile import ./research-bot.tar.gz
hermes profile import ./research-bot.tar.gz --name research-bot-2

The profile name is inferred from the archive unless you pass --name. Importing over an existing profile is refused — rename or delete the old one first. A shell wrapper (research-bot → hermes -p research-bot) is created when the name doesn't collide with an existing command.

Importing in the desktop app also applies the desktop.json overlay and drops you into the new profile on a fresh chat. Importing a desktop-made archive from the CLI is fine — the overlay file rides along on disk and applies the next time you open that profile in the desktop.

What an export file contains

Always excluded, both profiles types: auth.json and .env. Your API keys never leave the machine.

The default profile (~/.hermes) is exported through an allow-list — only known Hermes artifacts, so an unrelated file sitting in your home directory can't get swept in:

config.yaml, SOUL.md, MEMORY.md, USER.md, todo.json, system_prompt.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, skills/, plugins/, cron/, scripts/, sessions/, memories/, knowledge/, preferences/, and desktop.json when the desktop staged one.

A named profile (~/.hermes/profiles/<name>) copies the whole directory minus auth.json / .env. That's broader — if the profile has state.db, logs, or caches, they go in the archive too, and the file gets big.

The installer hard-excludes these paths even if an author accidentally ships them. No config option lets you override this — the safety guard is a regression-tested invariant:

• auth.json — OAuth tokens, platform credentials
• .env — API keys, secrets
• memories/ — conversation memory
• sessions/ — conversation history
• state.db, state.db-shm, state.db-wal — session metadata
• logs/ — agent and error logs
• workspace/ — generated working files
• plans/ — scratch plans
• home/ — user's home mount in Docker backends
• *_cache/ — image / audio / document caches
• local/ — user-reserved customization namespace

When you clone a distribution as an installer, these simply aren't copied into your profile directory. When you update, your copies stay put. If you installed the same distribution on five machines, you have five isolated sets of this data — one per machine.

Profile distributions are unsigned by default. You're trusting:

• The git host (GitHub / GitLab / wherever) to serve the bytes the author pushed.
• The author to not ship a malicious SOUL, skills, or cron jobs.

Cron jobs from a distribution are not auto-scheduled — the installer prints hermes -p <name> cron list and you enable them explicitly. SOUL.md and skills ARE active as soon as you start chatting with the profile, so read them before your first run if you're installing from someone you don't know.

Rough analogy: installing a distribution is like installing a browser extension or a VS Code extension. Low friction, high power, trust the source. For internal company distributions, use a private repo and your normal git auth — nothing new to configure.

Future versions may add signing, a lockfile (.distribution-lock.yaml) with a resolved commit SHA, and a --dry-run flag that prints the diff before applying an update. None of those are shipping yet.

For implementation details, precise CLI behavior, and all flags, see the Profile Commands reference.

The short version:

• install, update, info live inside hermes profile — not a parallel command tree.
• The manifest format is YAML with a tiny required schema (name only).
• The installer uses your local git binary for cloning, so any auth your shell already handles (SSH keys, credential helpers) works transparently.
• After clone, .git/ is stripped — the installed profile isn't itself a git checkout, avoiding "oh my, I accidentally committed my .env to the distribution's git history" traps.
• Reserved profile names (hermes, test, tmp, root, sudo) are rejected at install time to avoid collisions with common binaries.

• Profiles: Running Multiple Agents — the base concept
• Profile Commands reference — every flag, every option
• hermes profile export / import — the CLI form of export files ↗
• Slash Commands reference — /export, /import, and every other in-chat command
• Using SOUL with Hermes — authoring personalities
• Personality & SOUL — how SOUL fits into the agent
• Skills catalog — skills you can bundle