GitHub - theonejb/sshenv: A simple CLI utility to switch between different SSH environments.

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sshenv

sshenv is a Python 3 based CLI utility to manage multiple SSH environments. See What are SSH Environments section below for the rationale behind creating this.

This is V0.5. While I have tested it as well as I can and it's a pretty simple Python program, please do make a backup of you .ssh directory before using this. I'm can't guarantee that your machine won't catch on fire if you use this.

Installation

Installation can be done by downloading the sshenv.py file and saving it somewhere on your system.

Personally I sym-link the sshenv.py file into a directory on my $PATH (~/.local/bin/) as sshenv and make it executable by chmod u+x sshenv. I can then use the sshenv command from my shell in any directory to switch environments.

Requirements

The only dependency is a recent version of Python. sshenv was developed on Python 3.7.0 but should work with any recent version.

I have only tested this on an Ubuntu machine but I'm 99.99% sure it works on a Mac without any issues as well.

I can give no indication of how well, if at all, this works on Windows.

Usage

sshenv -h
usage: sshenv [-h] {list,l,deactivate,d,switch,s,activate,a} ...

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Commands:
  {list,l,deactivate,d,switch,s,activate,a}
    list (l)            Output a list of environments and exit.
    deactivate (d)      Deactivate the currently active env.
    switch (s, activate, a)
                        Activates the environment which matches the name or
                        number given. If an environment is currently active it
                        is first deactivated.

By default it uses ~/.ssh as the SSH_HOME but you can customize this by setting a different value of the environment variable SSH_HOME when running the script.

Any directories under SSH_HOME that contain a .sshenv file are considered valid environments that can be activated.

What are SSH Environments?

As part of my day job, side projects, and freelancing projects, I have to use different SSH keys to connect to different systems.

Systems can be servers on some cloud provide (AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean), source code repos (GitHub, BitBucket), etc...

Until now, I've managed these using a config file in my .ssh directory. Unfortunately it gets a bit difficult because:

  • I have to update the config file every time.
  • Some systems like BitBucket only allow me to add a SSH key to 1 account. Working with different clients means I have to have a different SSH key to use with BitBucket for each client and having to configure aliases like clientbucket in config and then using that in git clone git@clientbucket:/.... This gets tiring.

An SSH environment is the set of key files and optionally a config for a particular project.

For example, say I have 2 projects, client1 & client2. To use sshenv I need have the following directory structure:

~/.ssh
+
|
+--+client1
|  |
|  +-+id_rsa
|  |
|  +-+id_rsa.pub
|  |
|  +-+config
|  |
|  +-+.sshenv
|
|
+--+client2
   |
   +-+id_rsa
   |
   +-+bitbucket
   |
   +-+aws_us_east_1
   |
   +-+.sshenv

With this structure, I can now run sshenv switch client2 and all the files inside the client2 environment will be sym-linked into my .ssh/ directory.

I can also run sshenv switch client1 and:

  1. The files sym-linked for client2 will be removed
  2. All files under the client1 environment will be sym-linked into .ssh/.

Other tools

The idea for sshenv is heavily inspired by how pyenv works. But this is not the first tool that allows managing a set of key files. Some alternatives are: