How to create a Chrome profile programmatically?

Question

Development, testing, staging environments are controlled via different proxy servers in my setup. I want to script creation of multiple Chrome profiles (sometimes called \"user

Answer 1

From this documentation, I finally found a way to create a user/person, rather than a separate profile. The difference is especially important in Mac OS X since different profiles can be opened concurrently using the same Chrome process.

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --args --profile-directory="StagingEnv" --first-run

The only unfortunate fact is that this new person doesn't inherit the name from the profile directory. Instead, it is always called Person X where X is an increment number.

I need to go to the Local State file to change it.

grep -o '"StagingEnv":{[^}]*}' ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Local\ State

"StagingEnv":{"active_time":1437709453.172762,"avatar_icon":"chrome://theme/IDR_PROFILE_AVATAR_6","background_apps":false,"is_ephemeral":false,"is_omitted_from_profile_list":false,"is_using_default_avatar":true,"is_using_default_name":true,"managed_user_id":"","name":"Person 3","user_name":""}

This file is overridden when Chrome quits, so I need to kill Chrome, change the file and run Chrome again.