SSH Shortcut

I’m often asked how I SSH into a server by just typing ssh myserver instead of typing out the whole command and without creating an alias. The answer is a fairly simple, yet often overlooked, configuration file in your .ssh directory.

Open ~/.ssh/config or create it if it doesn’t already exist and add the following to it:

Host MyServer
    HostName your.server.ip.address
    User yourUsername
    Compression yes
    Ciphers aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr

The Compression and Ciphers lines are not required, I just prefer using them. Some servers may give you an error about ciphers not being supported… just remove that line or change the ciphers to ones supported by your server.