I Got Tired of Passing --profile on Every OCI CLI Command

The article describes the problem of managing multiple Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) tenancies via the CLI, which requires passing both `--compartment-id` and `--profile` flags on every command. The author created a tool called `ocswitch` that simplifies this by using separate config files per tenancy (e.g., `~/.oci/config_prod`) and persisting the active profile across terminal sessions via a state file (`~/.oci/active_profile`). The tool also includes tab completion and an `ocid` function to display the current tenancy and user details for confirmation.

This is a problem you only run into if you work for Oracle directly or you work at a Cloud/DevOps MSP managing OCI for multiple clients. Most people will never touch it. If you are reading this, you are probably not most people. The OCI CLI already demands a --compartment-id on almost every command. Compartment IDs are long, they are not memorable, and you need a different one depending on what you are looking at. That was already a nightmare before you add multiple tenancies to the picture. Once you are juggling prod, staging, dev, and a handful of client accounts, passing --profile on top of --compartment-id on every single command becomes the kind of friction that breaks you. So I wrote ocswitch . What the OCI CLI Actually Gives You The OCI CLI reads config from ~/.oci/config by default. You can point it at a different file with OCI CONFIG FILE , and select a named profile within that file with OCI CLI PROFILE . That is the full surface area you have to work with. The multi-profile story in the official tooling is basically: put multiple PROFILE NAME sections in one config file and pass --profile PROFILE NAME every time. If you forget the flag, you hit whichever profile is in DEFAULT . This works but it is tedious, and it is session-scoped - export the env var in one terminal, open another, you are back to default. ocswitch fixes the persistence problem by writing the active profile to ~/.oci/active profile and restoring it at shell startup. How It Works Profiles are separate config files in ~/.oci/ : ~/.oci/config prod ~/.oci/config staging ~/.oci/config dev One file per tenancy, named config <profile . When you switch: ocswitch prod Two things happen: ~/.oci/active profile gets written with the string prod , and OCI CONFIG FILE plus OCI CLI PROFILE are exported in the current shell. Every oci command you run after that hits the prod tenancy. The persistence part lives at the top of the script, outside the function, so it runs every time the shell sources the file: oci state="${HOME}/.oci/active profile" if -f "$ oci state" ; then oci profile=$ cat "$ oci state" oci cfg="${HOME}/.oci/config ${ oci profile}" if -f "$ oci cfg" ; then export OCI CONFIG FILE="$ oci cfg" export OCI CLI PROFILE="config ${ oci profile}" fi fi Open a new terminal, source kicks in, reads the state file, exports the right vars. The active profile follows you across sessions without any extra steps. What It Looks Like ocswitch list shows all detected profiles anything matching ~/.oci/config with the active one highlighted in Oracle red. ocswitch clear removes the state file and unsets both env vars. Tab completion is included for both bash and zsh. Hit tab after ocswitch and you get list , clear , and all your profile names. The ocid Bonus There is a second function in the script: ocid . It reads the active config, pulls the tenancy OCID and user OCID out of it, and calls the OCI IAM API to resolve the human-readable names: Tenant Name: mycompany-production Tenant ID: ocid1.tenancy.oc1..aaaa... User Email: user@example.com Useful when you have switched between a few profiles and want to confirm exactly which tenancy you are currently pointing at before running something destructive. Install zsh curl -fsSL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amaanx86/2621a181e2f4b572a1904d65748d66bd/raw/ocswitch.zsh \ -o ~/.oci/ocswitch.zsh echo 'source ~/.oci/ocswitch.zsh' ~/.zshrc source ~/.zshrc bash curl -fsSL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/amaanx86/2621a181e2f4b572a1904d65748d66bd/raw/ocswitch.bash \ -o ~/.oci/ocswitch.bash echo 'source ~/.oci/ocswitch.bash' ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc Usage ocswitch show help + logo ocswitch list list profiles active highlighted ocswitch <profile switch profile persists across all terminals ocswitch clear clear active profile Profile Setup Each profile is a standard OCI config file at ~/.oci/config <profile . The section header inside the file uses the same name as the file itself, not DEFAULT : config prod user=ocid1.user.oc1..aaaa... fingerprint=xx:xx:xx:... tenancy=ocid1.tenancy.oc1..aaaa... region=us-ashburn-1 key file=~/.oci/oci api key.pem So ~/.oci/config staging has config staging inside, ~/.oci/config dev has config dev , and so on. The full source is in this gist https://gist.github.com/amaanx86/2621a181e2f4b572a1904d65748d66bd . Two files, one for bash and one for zsh, no external dependencies beyond the OCI CLI itself. Originally published at amaanx86.github.io https://amaanx86.github.io/blog/ocswitch-oci-profile-switcher/ .