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      How to Create an SSH Shortcut


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      If you are constantly needing to SSH into multiple servers, it can real daunting to remember all the different usernames, hostnames, IP addresses, and even sometimes custom private keys to connect to them. It’s actually extremely easy to create command line shortcuts to solve this problem. There’s two major ways to do it, and we’ll discuss the pros and cons of each.

      Method 1: Using SSH Config

      SSH on *NIX machines, such as Linux or Mac, have default shortcut functionality right out of the box. It’s very straight forward to setup, too. For those two reasons, this is my preferred way of setting up SSH shortcuts. The first step is to navigate to your .ssh folder:

      cd ~/.ssh
      

      Following this, you’ll need to create a file called config. Here’s how to do it with Vim:

      vim config
      

      From here, you can now create shortcuts. You can specify the hostname, username, port, and the private key. For a full list of options, please visit the official docs. Here’s an example of how to structure the file:

      Host scotch
          HostName scotch.io
          User nick
      
      Host example2
          HostName example.com
          User root
      
      Host example3
          HostName 64.233.160.0
          User userxyz123
          Port 56000
      
      Host droplet1
          HostName droplet1.digitalocean.com
          User ec2-user
          IdentityFile /path/to/special/privatekey/droplet1.pem
      

      Now, you can simply SSH into any of these servers with these simple commands:

      ssh scotch
      ssh example2
      ssh example3
      ssh droplet1
      

      If this isn’t working for you, trying changing the permissions of the config file like this:

      chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config
      

      Method 2: Create aliases for your shell

      This method involves creating an alias for your shell (or terminal). You can use this for creating any type of shortcut you want, but a lot of people use them for SSH shortcuts. To set this up, you’ll need to navigate to your .bash_aliases file (or some people do this in .bashrc or .bash_profile). The following command will create the .bash_aliases file if it doesn’t exist or just edit it if it already does using Vim.

      vim ~/.bash_aliases
      

      Here you can add as many shortcuts as you want. Here’s how to add the same SSH shortcuts from above:

      alias scotch="ssh [email protected]"
      alias example2='ssh [email protected]'
      alias example3='ssh [email protected] -p 56000'
      alias droplet1='ssh [email protected] -i /path/to/special/privatekey/droplet1.pem'
      

      After you add those and save the file, you’ll need to “reboot” the aliases file with:

      source ~/.bash_aliases
      

      Once that is completed, you can now SSH into all of those same boxes by just typing the following:

      scotch
      example2
      example3
      droplet1
      

      This method provides additional flexibility that the first method might not be able to provide, but it really comes down to a matter of preference for most use cases.



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