Profiles

A profile is a named bundle of cloud credentials stored locally in ~/.alchemy/profiles.json. Profiles let you:

• Keep work and personal accounts separate
• Use a different IAM role for prod vs dev
• Rotate or refresh tokens without losing other configurations

Profiles are independent from Stages. A stage controls what is deployed; a profile controls how alchemy authenticates to deploy it.

The default profile

Every command uses the profile named default unless you pass --profile <name> or set $ALCHEMY_PROFILE. New users never need to think about profiles — the first deploy creates default automatically.

alchemy deploy
# uses profile `default`

How credentials get there

The first time you alchemy deploy (or destroy, dev, plan), alchemy walks each cloud provider registered in your stack and prompts you to authenticate. Pick OAuth, paste an API token, point at an SSO profile — whatever the provider offers. The result is saved under your current profile.

To re-run that flow at any time:

# Refresh credentials for the current profile
alchemy login

# Re-run the interactive setup (e.g. switch from OAuth → API token)
alchemy login --configure

# Log into a separate profile
alchemy login --profile prod --configure

login imports your stack file to discover which providers are needed, so the prompts match the providers you actually use.

Inspecting a profile

Use alchemy profile show to see what’s stored (credentials are redacted):

alchemy profile show
alchemy profile show --profile prod

Sample output:

Profile: default

── AWS ──
  accessKeyId:     ASIA****
  secretAccessKey: Pj5T****
  region:          us-west-2
  source: sso - default

── Cloudflare ──
  accessToken: Xl06****
  expires: in 59m 58s 999ms
  accountId: 123456789...
  source: oauth

Switching profiles

Pass --profile to any command, or export ALCHEMY_PROFILE in your shell:

alchemy deploy --stage prod --profile prod
alchemy destroy --stage pr-42 --profile work

export ALCHEMY_PROFILE=work
alchemy deploy

A typical pairing in CI is one profile per environment:

alchemy deploy --stage staging --profile staging
alchemy deploy --stage prod --profile prod

Where profiles live

Profiles are stored at ~/.alchemy/profiles.json. The file is plain JSON keyed by profile name; you can edit it manually, but alchemy login --configure is usually safer because it knows the shape each provider expects.

For the full set of CLI flags involving profiles see alchemy login and alchemy profile show in the CLI reference. For environment isolation, see Stages.