Thanks for the quick fix! Worth noting that setting $HOME won't cover tools that resolve the home directory via getpwuid(getuid()) at runtime. Those will still see /root regardless of $HOME. Might be worth documenting this limitation or considering a more complete solution long-term.

Another edge case: Playwright installs browser binaries to $HOME/.cache/ms-playwright/ at build time, which resolves to /root/.cache/ during docker build. After this fix, HOME moves to the profile directory at runtime and Playwright won't find its binaries, even with a single profile.
Setting PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH to a fixed path inside the image like /opt/hermes/.playwright doesn't fully solve it either, as that path doesn't survive docker pull + recreate.
The clean fix would be moving Playwright installation to entrypoint.sh with PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH pointing to somewhere inside /opt/data, so it installs once and persists in the volume. Something like:
if [ ! -d "$PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH" ]; then npx playwright install --with-deps chromium --only-shell fi
with ENV PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=/opt/data/.playwright"

Thanks @ferranbonas

Your proposed fix for Playwright makes sense. I'll add the entrypoint.sh and Dockerfile changes to this PR so the binaries persist in the volume.

I'll also include a quick note in the docs about the getpwuid(getuid()) limitation.

Thanks for the PR and the thorough issue writeup in #4426 — the problems you identified (credential sharing across profiles, Docker non-persistence) are real.

Unfortunately, mutating HOME globally would break the profiles system itself. Several core functions are deliberately anchored to Path.home():

• _get_profiles_root() → Path.home() / ".hermes" / "profiles"
• _get_default_hermes_home() → Path.home() / ".hermes"
• _get_wrapper_dir() → Path.home() / ".local" / "bin"
• systemd service discovery → Path.home() / ".config" / "systemd" / ...

This is by design — profile operations need the real user HOME so that hermes -p coder profile list can see all profiles regardless of which one is active. Overriding HOME would also affect every Python library and system tool in the process (os.path.expanduser, pip, virtualenv, shell ~ expansion, etc.).

The right approach for credential isolation would be tool-specific env vars (GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL, GIT_AUTHOR_NAME/GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, XDG_CONFIG_HOME, etc.) set per-profile, and for Docker persistence, documenting an additional volume mount for /root. We'll keep #4426 open to track this.

Appreciate the contribution!

Thanks for taking the time to review and explain the internals! I suspected there might be deeper Python-level issues I wasn't seeing. Appreciate the thorough response.