Tuesday, January 11, 2011

sshoot

Reading through the Passionate programmer by Chad Fowler (If you have not read it yet what are you waiting for?) has motivated me to find ways that I can optimize my daily workflow to create savings that my customer's can realize. One thing that I found that has been causing me pain in an increasing amount as I moved more of my servers onto the EC2 cloud was my lack of a good system for storing and retrieving SSH connections.

Out of that need sshoot was hatched, it is a very simple to use ssh connection manager for use on the command line. It is heavily inspired by the awesome work of Zach Holman on the Boom project. What I tried to do was create a user friendly way to create and open ssh connections by associating them with a friendly name. I had been doing this with .ssh/config file but I would sometimes forget the name I had given to a connection and did not want to open the file and search for the connection I was interested in. Now I can name them what I want and then quickly get a a list of my connections and open one easily all from the comfort of my command line.

Creating a new connection is super simple.

$ sshoot vm ubuntu@192.168.1.102
Loaded a new round called vm.

Now you have a new saved ssh connection you can open by typing.
$ sshoot vm

Should want to remove a connection just issue the following.
$ sshoot vm delete

You can clone it here. It is still very much in its infancy but I hope to add more features as time permits. I would love to get any feedback or contributions, so send them my way.