Desktop App Profiles: One App, Many Servers

👤 Ton Kersten

If you use WarmDesk across multiple customers or self-hosted instances, today’s release removes the friction. The desktop app now supports profiles — named slots that each carry their own completely isolated login session, preferences, and stored settings.

The problem profiles solve

Before today, switching between WarmDesk instances meant manually changing the server URL, logging out, and logging back in. Worse, every switch wiped out your local preferences (theme, locale, sidebar layout) for the previous server.

With profiles you simply launch a second window for a different customer:

warmdesk --profile customer-a

Each profile is backed by its own WebView data directory. Nothing is shared — not the auth token, not the server URL, not the theme, not the sidebar order. The two windows are as independent as two different browsers.

Managing profiles

Profiles live in a profiles.json file in your platform config directory. You never need to edit the file by hand — the CLI handles it.

# See what profiles exist
warmdesk --list-profiles

# Create a new profile with a readable label
warmdesk --create-profile acme --label "Acme Corp"
warmdesk --create-profile internal --label "Internal"

# Change the default (used when no --profile flag is given)
warmdesk --set-default internal

# Remove a profile you no longer need
warmdesk --delete-profile old-client

A --list-profiles run looks like this:

WarmDesk profiles  (~/.config/com.warmdesk.desktop/profiles.json)

  * internal                 Internal
    acme                     Acme Corp
    customer-b               Customer B

  * = default  |  use --profile <name> to select

Telling windows apart

Non-default profiles show the label in the window title bar — WarmDesk — Acme Corp — so you always know which instance you are looking at. Running two or three profiles side by side is practical on a wide monitor.

Where data is stored

Profile data sits under your platform data directory, one subdirectory per profile:

PlatformPath

Linux

~/.local/share/com.warmdesk.desktop/profiles/<name>/

macOS

~/Library/Application Support/com.warmdesk.desktop/profiles/<name>/

Windows

%APPDATA%\com.warmdesk.desktop\profiles\<name>\

Deleting a profile with --delete-profile removes it from profiles.json but leaves the data directory on disk, so nothing is lost by accident. Remove the directory manually if you want to reclaim the space.

Browser users

Profiles are a desktop-app feature. If you use WarmDesk in a browser you can achieve the same isolation with browser profiles or separate private windows, since the server URL and auth cookies are already scoped to the browser session.