My profiles.json became empty. Better way to build it again?

[Steph]

Operating system

Windows

Joplin version

2.14.19

Desktop version info

can't open

Editor

Rich Text Editor

What issue do you have?

Hello,
Windows 11, Joplin 2.4 ? Many profiles (more than ten).
My Joplin can't open (error message : "could not parse profile configuration (...) Unexpected end of JSON input") because the "profiles.json" file became suddently (I have done nothing) empty (no text at all and 0 k) !!!
What is the better way to fix that ? If I reinstall Joplin will the file will be restaured correctly ?
Thanks for help.

[laurent]

What if you delete the profiles.json file? Isn't it going to recreate one from scratch?

[Steph]

Bonjour Laurent ! Merci pour cette rapide réponse.
I renamed the file "profiles.json" into "profiles.old". Now Joplin is opening again.
But with the "default" profile only. There are no more other profiles into the File menu except the "default" one. It's normal because there's no new profiles.json automatically created... So no link between the folder profile and his "understable" name...
On disk, all my profiles directories are still there with their datas...

[Steph]

I suppose I can manually create the content of the profiles.json with new "understable" names for profiles in relation with their directories's names but it will save my time to have the correct name of the profile immediatly... It will also avoid me issues because some profiles were very similar and it's possible I will make confusions...

[laurent]

Yes you can recreate the link to these profiles using this syntax in profiles.json:

{
	"version": 2,
	"currentProfileId": "default",
	"profiles": [
		{
			"name": "Default",
			"id": "default"
		},
		{
			"name": "Another profile",
			"id": "PROFILEID"
		}
	]
}

PROFILEID is used to match the profile directory profile-PROFILEID. I can't think of any reason that could cause this file to be 0 bytes, but I'll keep that in mind and see if other users have this issue. If you use the Backup plugin I think it includes a copy of profiles.json by the way.

[Steph]

Thank you for the code...
This is the analyse of the "profiles.json" file I made :

[Steph]

The "profiles.json" location

and how look the directories profiles names :

I did the blur for privacy

[Steph]

So I succeed to rebuild a "profiles.json" file with this code and to be able to open all my profiles. But like I said previously I couldn't remember their original names (the "name" on my analyse). So I used letters (A, B, C, D, etc...) and I will rename another day !