HOW TO: SSH Aliases
When I think back on 2010, I’d have to say I SSH’d into well over 100 different machines. Late last year I found out about the SSH config file, and coming across it was one of those “Why didn’t I find out earlier?” moments.
The SSH config file is located in ~/.ssh/config or can be added if it doesn’t already exist. There is a slew of things you can add to this file (which you can find from man ssh_config) but the neatest thing I’ve found is setting server aliases.
Let’s assume you SSH frequently with this command: ssh exampleuser@example.com
By adding this to ~/.ssh/config:
Host example HostName example.com User exampleuser
You can reduce that to previous command to ssh example
Nice huh?
Do you have a multi-server infrastructure that you log into consistently?
Host project.web1 HostName web1.project.com User webadmin Host project.web2 HostName web2.project.com User webadmin Host project.db1 HostName db1.project.com User webadmin Host project.util1 HostName util1.project.com User webadmin Host project.stage HostName stage.project.com User webadmin
Which boils down to command like
ssh project.web1 ssh project.db1 .... ssh a_different_user@project.db1 # you always have the option of overriding at the command line.
You can also specify the host by IP directly:
Host example HostName 127.0.0.1 User exampleuser
And you can use different SSH keys:
Host example2 Hostname example.com User exampleuser IdentityFile ~/.ssh/another_ssh.identity
If you’re a heavy remote user, this saves a lot of typing and lookups from READMEs and notes. It’s nice to be able to refer to my aliases rather than scattered URL and IP addresses across projects.
Another great perk: the config also affects (most) other tools that depend on SSH like SCP, Rsync, and even Transmit!
12 Comments
Keith Gaddis February 04, 2011 http://www.karmajunkie.com
Another good tip, if you’re a mac user who likes iTerm: the bookmarks are a total timesaver. I also use those to set the color of my terminal, so when I’m on a production shell, the background is always red. Its kept me from doing some stupid stuff on more than one occasion.
Brian Ryckbost February 04, 2011 http://ryckbost.com
If you’re using an ssh key, do you know if the pubkey authentication and forward agent option need to be added?
Zach Moazeni February 04, 2011 http://collectiveidea.com
@Brian,
I don’t know if they have to be added. I don’t have them in my config, but I also took a look at /etc/ssh_config and didn’t see any declarations. It’s possible that those are default. The couple declarations that I use a different public.key worked without them.
But it’s good to point out in case someone else has trouble getting it working.
Barry Hess February 04, 2011 http://bjhess.com
I’ve loved SSH aliases for 6 months or so, too. They’re great!
One thing is they stopped me from sharing my dotfiles. I finally got the sense to put ssh/config in Dropbox and then in my dotfiles project I symlink over to the Dropbox version.
Andy Keller February 04, 2011 http://tractionsoftware.com
I also add “Compression yes” to each of my aliases, though I can’t say I’ve carefully evaluated the tradeoff between CPU and I/O involved when doing small tasks in a shell. Maybe if you’re on a slow connection you’ll notice a difference.
man ssh_config for more ssh config fun.
Mike Krisher February 04, 2011 http://www.mikekrisher.com
I been doing simple bash aliasing for a number of years now, like:
alias login_stage=‘ssh user@staging.server.com -p 2301’
May have to switch to get more structure. Great post.
Hussain Nagri July 17, 2012 http://www.codewoes.com
i edited the config file and it worked great for 3 days but after then it sarted giving error like
ssh: Could not resolve hostname hostname: Name or service not known
but with ssh hostame@SameIpAsInConfigFile it workes fine.
The config file is intact and untouched. do you have any idea what is wrong ?
Stuart Layton September 20, 2012
Wow! thanks for posting this, this is one of those features I find myself wanting but never taking the time to learn about.
Peter Fisher September 24, 2012 http://blog.peterfisher.me.uk
Really useful thanks
fero December 17, 2012
Very useful. Thanks!
Max March 21, 2013 http://max-klinger.org
You are missing the best feature yet. With new enough openssh versions you can write
host foo bar
hostname %h.domain.name
username webadmin
and then ssh foo will turn into webadmin@foo.domain.name while ssh bar will turn into webadmin@bar.domain.name
toramanlis May 05, 2013
you can also specify the port by simply adding this line under a certain host:
Port xxxx
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