user-defined profiles

[oncilla]

Hello!

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Issue details

I have a couple of certificate templates that I use very frequently. I would love to be able to reference them
by a name with the --profile flag instead of providing them with the template flag.

The idea would be to place them in a specific path (e.g., the step dir) and let the CLI discover them
automatically.

I would go as far as even integrating this in the help message and tab completion. Such that it is
easy to use.

I would be happy to contribute the code to achieve this. However, I need some guidance:

1. Is this something that you would accept into the CLI?
2. Where would be a good place to put these templates?

Why is this needed?

I would like to easily share a bundle of profiles with other users and make them easy to discover in the help message and tab completion.

[hslatman]

Hey @oncilla,

This does sound like an interesting feature, but when we discussed this in our triage meeting, we decided we need some more information regarding the use case to get a clear view of a potential solution, or at least a general direction. Could you provide some more background, and the estimated number of profiles to be shared? Are you using both the CLI and CA,

Here are some of my current thoughts:

You suggest to use the --profile flag to point to a template. Hypothetically, if we were to store the template on disk, it wouldn't be that much different from having to specify the path to the template using --template, so it doesn't seem to be a big win in that regard. Besides that, the --profile flag is currently used for some fairly well-defined and hard-coded templates for specific purposes, whereas a template is more dynamic, and its contents can be changed at any time. You could say a profile is a combination of a template for a specific purpose.

Having some form of sharing templates and address those sounds like it needs some form of file sharing capability. It is not likely we'll add something like that to the CLI, unless we could use it for more purposes. It could be an option to store templates in the CA database, which would then be in charge of providing shared access to templates.