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Creating a Local SSH Configuration File

If you connect to lots of different servers using SSH, you may end up executing complex commands like the following:

$ ssh [email protected] -p 22123
$ ssh [email protected]
$ ssh [email protected] -p 22001

Remembering the user, hostname or IP and port number for each SSH connection is not easy. Luckily, SSH lets you store this information in a configuration file so you can connect to those servers using easy-to-remember names:

$ ssh client1
$ ssh client2
$ ssh client2-staging

Defining the SSH Server Configuration

Let's consider that you execute the ssh [email protected] -p 22123 command to connect to the server of your client called client1.

Step 1. Edit (or create if it doesn't exist) a file called ~/.ssh/config (this is a file called config in a hidden directory called .ssh/ inside your user directory; for example /Users/jane).

Step 2. Add the configuration for the server using this format:

Host client1
  HostName 123.123.123.123
  User user1
  Port 22123

Step 3. Save the changes, close the ~/.ssh/config file and test the new config executing the following command: ssh client1. You should be connected to the server of your client.

Step 4. Now repeat the above steps to add the config of the rest of the servers.

Additional Config Options

The above example used the HostName, User and Port options, but SSH config files can define a lot of other options. These are the most common:

Host client1
    # ...

    # if set to 'yes', SSH compresses any communication between your local computer
    # and the remote server. At first it looks like a good idea, but it should be
    # enabled only for slow connections. On fast connections, this setting will
    # actually make your connection slower because of the compression overhead.
    Compression yes

    # some people don't recommend using this option because it may be dangerous
    # in some scenarios. In any case, there's no need to define it in this config
    # file because you can enable/disable it using the deployer config file.
    ForwardAgent yes

    # it defines the timeout interval (in seconds) after which, if no data has been
    # received from the server, ssh will send a message to the server to maintain the
    # connection alive (it's useful to avoid connection drops because of inactivity)
    ServerAliveInterval 60

    # it defines the path to the private key used to connect to the server. By
    # default it uses one of these files: ~/.ssh/{id_dsa,id_ecdsa,id_rsa}
    # Define this option only for advanced scenarios where you use different auth
    # keys per remote server.
    IdentityFile /path/to/ssh_id_rsa or /path/to/ssh_id_dsa or /path/to/ssh_id_ecdsa

See the full list of SSH configuration options.