Config view and runtime settings are not the same when bundled profile is not populated

[alpes214]

Hi!

I am new to Prefect and want to check how it works. I cloned the repository and started a local server with prefect server start in one console session. The bundled local profile points at http://127.0.0.1:4200/api, so in another session I ran prefect profile use local to connect my flow to that server.

prefect config view confirmed it: PREFECT_API_URL='http://127.0.0.1:4200/api' (from profile). But when I ran my flow script, it did not use that server - it silently started its own temporary ephemeral one. So the local profile is shown by config view but not applied at runtime. It might not be a bug, but it looks inconsistent!

Note: I did not run prefect profile populate-defaults, so prefect profile use local wrote only active = "local" with an empty [profiles] table - the local profile itself was never copied into ~/.prefect/profiles.toml.

With further investigation I found that if bundled profile (https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/60025750fb7ea1d69fef8a1c8b1e013cdc8149ae/src/prefect/settings/profiles.toml) is not copied into ~/.prefect/profiles.toml using populate-defaults it still can be shown through config view, but script execution does not merge it into settings and silently starts a temporary ephemeral server.

export PREFECT_HOME=$(mktemp -d)
prefect profile use local                    # writes only: active="local", empty [profiles]
prefect config view | grep API_URL           # PREFECT_API_URL='http://127.0.0.1:4200/api' (from profile)
python -c "from prefect.settings import Settings; print(Settings().api.url)"   # None

the script doesn't find local, and substitutes ephemeral - it never resolves the selected local by name.

The possible cause is in the ProfileSettingsTomlLoader._load_profile_settings (

prefect/src/prefect/settings/sources.py

Lines 163 to 164 in 6002575

	if not active_profile or active_profile not in profiles_data:
	return self._get_default_profile()

) - when the active profile isn't in ~/.prefect/profiles.toml, falls back to _get_default_profile() (the template's ephemeral) instead of resolving the selected name against the bundled template.

As a summary: both read the bundled profiles.toml, but prefect config view resolves the selected profile (local) against it, while ProfileSettingsTomlLoader._load_profile_settings only falls back to the template's default (ephemeral) — it never resolves the selected name.

Not sure if this case is worth fixing. A similar case for the ephemeral profile was reported in #16118 / #16101 and fixed in #16119 - but that fix only covers the template's default profile; the same situation with local remains unhandled. It comes as a surprise for people who start using Prefect for development from a clean checkout. For production installations, environment variables (or .env/prefect.toml) take precedence over profiles, so the inconsistency is visible only in a clean dev environment.