Sometimes I find annoying having to write the username and host when connecting trough SSH. Specially when the host name is very long and easy to forget.

But that is very easy to fix, we just need to create an alias for each host in the file /home/YourUserName/.ssh/config

Creating Alias

Create the file config if it doesn’t exist:

sudo touch ~/.ssh/config

Edit the file:

sudo nano ~/.ssh/config

And now just add the hosts:

Host host1
HostName address.to.my.host1
User YourUserName

Host host2
HostName address.to.my.host2
User YourUserName

Test it!

That’s it, we can now connect trough ssh just using the alias host1 or host2:

ssh host1

ssh host2

Much nicer than using the annoying whole string:

ssh YourUserName@address.to.my.host1

ssh YourUserName@address.to.my.host2