SSH config

Connecting to servers with SSH often will pretty fast turn in to a tedious task especially if you, like me, connecting with different users on different IP addresses with different keys. I do this almost daily.

Luckily there is a very nice solution and that’s the SSH configuration file where you can define all of this so you don’t need to remember everything all the time.

Config file

It’s a very simple configuration and the configuration file lives in ~/.ssh/config. You can create the file if it’s not already there.

The format looks like this:

Host <alias>
  Hostname <domain or ip>
  User <username>
  Identityfile </path/to/key>

• Host: Alias for your host. It will let you use this alias instead of IP/domain to connect. I.e ssh blog with the example from above, instead of ssh -i /path/to/key user@domain
• Hostname: The IP/domain of the server
• User: User on the remote system you want to connect with
• Identityfile: The path to your private key

Connect

Now we can easily connect with just ssh blog instead, much simpler. This of course also applies to scp.