A command line tool to manage your ssh config file | Hacker News Reader

A command line tool to manage your ssh config file

github.com

66 pointsbatuhanicoz9 comments

I've seen storm, it seems like it does way more than all I want, which is just to make believe .ssh/config.d is a thing.

So I just do that: https://github.com/Julian/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/zsh/....

And then just go on editing files.

(What I really want, which is another story, is a terser way to use knife ssh with queries, so that I can ssh around by service name and environment, but I haven't gotten a chance to write this in a fast enough form)

> (What I really want, which is another story, is a terser way to use knife ssh with queries, so that I can ssh around by service name and environment, but I haven't gotten a chance to write this in a fast enough form)

Curious how that would look?

I dunno, vim has always been the most useful command line tool to my manage my ssh config file. Maybe that's just me though.

Same here, but I work with a couple of developers who fear the command line (yes, I know) so this is still pretty useful.

What I really want from a dynamic .ssh/config file is a way to specify conditional options.

For example, today my .ssh/config is a symlink to either .ssh/config-home or .ssh/config-out on my laptop. If I'm out I use the config-out file but if I'm on my home VPN or at home I use config-home.

Also I have a ProxyCommand for many work servers so I proxy through my work laptop that is always on and this command is not needed if I'm in my work network.

So in two ways the only thing I ever needed from a dynamic ssh configuration is conditional options based on my network location. Today I change this manually with a script and symlinks, but have to maintain two different configurations.

Edit: I just realized while typing this that one solution would be to use a jinja2 template for my ssh_config instead of maintaining two different files.

With relatively recent ssh versions you can use the Match directive[1] inside your config file to do various conditional things.

Then you could do something like this:

    Host foo
      Hostname foo.example.com
      Match exec 'at_home_test.sh'
        Hostname vpn-gw.example.com
        Proxycommand ...

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ssh_config

I had no idea that existed, thanks! Time to rewrite my configs...

Holy crap, this needed to be in the SSH Kung Fu article. I wonder how to do a network test without slowing the ssh command down too much. At a certain point it becomes faster to type outsidednsname.voltagex.org than to wait for the match to execute.

Can you please remove your dependence on winrandom, and perhaps test it on python 3.4 + windows? Could not install winrandom on windows (2.7 only lib?).

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