We would recommend profiles to be version controlled, but the approach should ensure permissions configuration provides the level of flexibility required for the organization.
As mentioned in the repo structure, profiles need to be placed in src-access-mgmt.
DX@Scale's tooling provides support for version controlling profiles. Please read the following article to gain a quick intro how the tools work.
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Depending on your permissions strategy, one of the following approaches may be advisable:
- Admin-managed profiles. Here profiles are considered under the responsibility of an admin who can make changes without impacting functionality or having these changes overwritten. With this approach profiles are treated as org-specific metadata, and settings like IP range restrictions can be added manually in production. This would usually be preferable in a multi-org deployment or an environment where admins should retain flexibility over all aspects of permissions in the org.
- Source-managed profiles. Under this approach profiles are treated as core to the application and changes driven from a single source package definition. It's advisable here to use profiles to control only the minimal settings which cannot be provided through permission sets (e.g. page layout assignments, record type & app defaults and login restrictions) so admins have flexibility to control as much as possible by extending access using permission set combinations. This might be preferable in a single-org deployment where centralized control over permissions is desirable and settings like login IP ranges are static do not need to differ by org.
While using a scratch org based development, there is no specific need to use sfpowerkit command such as retrieve as normal sfdx push/pull would be suffice. sfpowerscripts automatically does a reconcile against the target org when the profile is deployed.