Creating Aliases for SSH Connections

Here’s a tip if you have some servers that you need to connect to often, especially if they have a long name and need a username that doesn’t match with the one on your local system, and even more so if you need to use an identity file, that is not the default one. The command would look something like this:

ssh some_user@server1-qualifier.region.company.com -i ~/.ssh/server1_id_rsa`

It’s possible to simplify this by creating an alias with all the required params in ~/.ssh/config file. Here’s how it would look for this scenario:

Host server1
    HostName server1-qualifier.region.company.com
    User some_user
    Port 22
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/server1_id_rsa

Then you simply do ssh server1, and you’re in!