SSH config

I first encountered the SSH config when I had to set up SSH for two BitBucket accounts. One work, and one personal. Requiring separate login credentials, setting the remote on Git repositories to ssh://git@bitbucket.org/... wasn’t going to work.

Each BitBucket account requires a different public SSH key so for two accounts I needed to generate two sets of keys. You’ll likely already have a keyset called id_rsa so call the new one something else:

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$ ssh-keygen 
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/Users/you/.ssh/id_rsa): bb-personal

Now in your ~/.ssh/ directory create a new file simply called config, for my example it looks like this:

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Host bitbucket-work
  User git
  Hostname bitbucket.org
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_work

Host bitbucket-personal
  User git
  Hostname bitbucket.org
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_personal

Now instead of bitbucket.org in my git remote URIs I substitute the relevant Host from my config:

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ssh://git@bitbucket-personal/...

Of course, you need to ensure the public key is configured over on BitBucket, GitHub etc.

To use config with your own remote machines is just as easy. You can use any of the keys you already have on your system, or create a new one as shown above.

If it doesn’t exist, create a file in the ~/.ssh/ directory on your remote machine called authorized_keys and copy the public key in to it, each one on a new line. Never the private key!

Now in your config file on your local machine create a new host for your remote machine:

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Host me-production
  User lewis
  Hostname <your host or ip>
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Strictly speaking, I don’t think the User line is necessary.

Now all I need to type in the terminal to ssh in to my production box is:

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$ ssh me-production