Recovery has exactly two states: with a backup, ten minutes; without one, reconfigure from scratch. The drill exists to confirm which state you are in before it matters.
Back up now (one minute)
cd ~/.dsh && tar -czf ~/dsh-profiles-$(date +%Y%m%d).tgz profiles ls -lh ~/dsh-profiles-*.tgz
profiles is around 1 MB. There is no excuse.
Drill: break it on purpose, then restore
- Confirm it works now:
dsh --profile web --dump-config | head - Add a line of invalid content to
~/.dsh/profiles/web/cordis.patch.ymland confirm startup fails. This teaches you what broken looks like. - Extract the backup over the directory.
- Run dump again and confirm recovery.
cd ~/.dsh && tar -xzf ~/dsh-profiles-20261114.tgz && dsh --profile web --dump-config | head
Careful: cordis.yml is not the file to edit
The header in the local cordis.yml says it plainly:
# dsh profile root — an empty entry list. The tree is composed as patches: # each bundle in package.json's dsh.profile.bundles, then cordis.patch.yml, then any # --patch overlays. Edit cordis.patch.yml, not this file. []
Composition order: bundles from package.json, then cordis.patch.yml, then command-line --patch. Edits to cordis.yml are effectively discarded by later layers while you believe they applied.
This is the easiest trap in a recovery drill: you think you changed the config, but that copy is rewritten or overridden on every boot. After recovering, confirm you are editing the patch layer.
If there is no backup
dsh --dump-default-configprints the default tree without the user layer; diff against it to find your extra edits.- Rebuild a profile by copying one that still works, then re-add changes from memory.
- The bundles list lives in
package.json— the easiest item to forget when rebuilding.