💾 Archived View for drew.monster › log › ssh_config.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:38:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
21 Jan 2021
I didn't know about the `~/.ssh/config` file until quite recently and it's *really* handy, so I thought I'd share.
`~/.ssh/config` lets you make what I think of as ssh aliases. You can give connections short names and specify various connection settings ‒ pretty much anything you can pass to ssh's CLI can be configured here.
Here's a simple example:
Host nas Hostname 192.168.1.10 Host laptop Hostname 192.168.1.11 User laptop-me Host someserver Hostname 203.0.113.1 User seriousthings Port 10100 PubkeyAuthentication yes Identityfile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_seriousthings Host * PubkeyAuthentication no
I am then able to do, for example, simply:
ssh nas
These settings apply from top to bottom, cumulatively. So you want to structure this file with *specific rules above general rules*, otherwise the general rules will override the specific, which is not what you want.
One nice benefit is that you'll get autocompletion of hosts defined in `~/.ssh/config` when using ssh under bash or zsh (at least).
`~/.ssh/config` can also be used to shore up some of the leaky parts of sshing, as described at the link below ‒ the whole page, and other articles in the series (linked at the top) are worth a read if you use ssh a decent amount.