hermes - 💡(How to fix) Fix profile create --clone-all --clone-from default recurses into destination when ~/.hermes/profiles/ is non-empty [4 comments, 3 participants]

Summary

hermes profile create <name> --clone-all --clone-from default triggers a deep recursive copy whenever ~/.hermes/profiles/ already contains at least one profile. The new profile directory ends up with <name>/profiles/<name>/profiles/<name>/... nesting that grows to 15+ levels and many GB before something aborts the copy.

In a real instance this produced a 24 GB profile directory after a single hermes profile create invocation.

Reproduction

# First named profile from default — succeeds (see "Why" below)
hermes profile create alpha --clone-all --clone-from default

# Second named profile from default — recurses
hermes profile create beta  --clone-all --clone-from default

find ~/.hermes/profiles/beta -name profiles -type d | wc -l   # >> 1
du -sh ~/.hermes/profiles/beta                                  # multi-GB

Why

In hermes_cli/profiles.py, the --clone-all branch of create_profile calls:

if clone_all and source_dir:
    shutil.copytree(source_dir, profile_dir)

with no ignore parameter. With --clone-from default:

• source_dir = ~/.hermes/
• profile_dir = ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/ (a child of source_dir)

shutil.copytree walks the source, descends into ~/.hermes/profiles/, and recurses into the destination it is currently populating.

Why the first profile escapes: shutil.copytree calls os.scandir(src) before it calls os.makedirs(dst). If ~/.hermes/profiles/ does not yet exist when the source listing is captured at the top level, it never appears in the iteration and no recursion happens. (The resulting first profile has no profiles/ subdirectory at all — easy to verify on disk.) Once ~/.hermes/profiles/ exists, every subsequent --clone-all --clone-from default recurses.

For comparison, export_profile in the same file already does the right thing — it passes a _default_export_ignore callable to shutil.copytree that excludes profiles, state.db*, .env, auth.json, and other infra when the source is the default profile. The --clone-all path has no equivalent filter.

Suggested fix

When source_dir == _get_default_hermes_home(), pass an ignore callable to shutil.copytree on the --clone-all path — at minimum excluding profiles/ at the source root. The existing _default_export_ignore is a near drop-in (or a less aggressive variant of it).

Optionally, validate up front that profile_dir is not a descendant of source_dir and raise a clear error otherwise — that would catch any future variant of this footgun.

Workaround

Clone from a named sibling profile so the destination is not a child of the source:

hermes profile create <name> --clone-all --clone-from <existing-named-profile>

I built a curated `template` profile via direct rsync from `~/.hermes/` with `--exclude=/profiles` (plus a few state files like `state.db*`, `sessions/`, `.hermes_history`, `gateway.{pid,lock}`, etc.), and switched my profile-creation automation to clone from `template`. Works reliably.

Environment

• Hermes Agent v0.11.0 (2026.4.23)
• Python 3.11.2
• Debian 12 / Linux 6.1.0-44-cloud-amd64