Saving time and effort with an SSH config file

I can't believe I've only recently discovered the benefits of having a config file sitting in ~/.ssh

A couple of my Digital Ocean boxes have non-standard SSH ports and it's a bit of an arse to type it out every time.

Example ~/.ssh/config:

Host projects
	HostName bencromwell.co.uk
    Port 424242
    User bc42

So simple and yet, if you don't know it exists, you don't know to look around for it.

After running $ ssh-copy-id projects you will be saving keystrokes forever more.

And it works with scp's somewhat awkward uppercase P too. Which can be an arse in itself when you're copying from two different remotes with two different non-standard ports.

In addition, I have a different SSH key for use with work projects and a different set of SSH configs that I wanted to keep isolated from my personal stuff.

To get around this, I the following setup:

Place config files in a particular location, use alphabetical ordering if you need to specify some defaults at the end. (I use zzz-default.conf which towards the end contains the Host * entry, which has to appear last.

Add the following to ~/.bashrc:

alias workssh='cat /path/to/workconfig/*.conf > /tmp/workssh.conf; ssh -F /tmp/workssh.conf "$@"'

The "$@" at the end passes on any extra flags you've passed to the command, such as -v and so on. Handy.

The only problem is you don't get host autocompletion on the command line.

Update: I wrote a management tool to make handling numerous SSH hosts easier: https://github.com/bencromwell/sshush