Save time with SSH aliases

If you’re a developer you probably find yourself connecting to servers over ssh several times each day. Remembering the server address, port, user and password can be hard - but it doesn’t have to be.

You might find yourself needing to use the following to get into a server:

$ ssh -p 3241 james@somehost-532242.long.example.org

Then you have to remember (or maybe even lookup) the password. It’s pretty tedious and time consuming. You could create a bash alias for each server but it’s not ideal; there’s a better way.

~/.ssh/config

Within this file you can define the hostname, user and port of a server and associate it to a short name like mainserver.

The syntax us fairly straightforward, here’s an alias based on the previous example.

host mainserver
  hostname somehost-532242.long.example.org
  user james
  port 3241

Now if you want to connect, you just need to type:

$ ssh mainserver

Much easier to remember. As an added bonus, scp also observes the alias so transferring files is now pretty simple.

# transfers access.log from the server to the current directory
$ scp mainserver:/var/log/access.log .

ssh-alias

I’ve put together a set of ruby scripts which makes it easy to add, delete and list the aliases in ~/.ssh/config.

Installation is simple:

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$ git clone git://github.com/jamesmoss/ssh-alias.git
$ cd ssh-alias
$ chmod +x ./*

You’ll also obviously need ruby installed. It comes with OS X by default.

To add a host run ./ssh-alias-new.rb and follow the prompts. The script also takes care of transferring your public key to the server so you won’t have to re-enter your password every time you connect.

If you want to remove an alias use ./ssh-alias-delete.rb and follow the prompts. ./ssh-alias-list.rb will print a list of every alias you’ve got setup.

The code is up on github if you want to fork or send a pull request. This is my first proper ruby project, so go easy on me.

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