Profiles

A profile is a template for a crawl job.  It contains all the configurations of a crawl job, but it is not considered "crawlable."  Heritrix will not allow you to directly crawl a profile.  Only jobs based on profiles can be crawled.

A common example of a profile configuration is to leave the metadata.operatorContactUrl property undefined to force the operator to input a valid value.

Profiles can be used as templates by leaving their configuration settings in an invalid state.  In this way, an operator is forced to choose his or her settings when creating a job from a profile.  This can be  advantageous when an administrator must configure many different crawl jobs to accommodate his or her crawling policy.

Whether a crawl job is a profile or a launchable job is determined by a file name of primary config file. If it starts with "profile-," it is a profile. Be careful when changing the name of a primary config file when manually copying the profile to create a launch-able crawl job.

As of Heritrix 3.1 the "profile-" naming convention has been eliminated.  There are no restrictions on a profile name.