SSH equivalent of .profile/.bashrc

Question

I am looking for a way to automatically define some aliases inside my session on any server I ssh to. I can't put them in the .bashrc files on the server because the user accounts I log in with are shared by other people and besides there are dozens of them and maintaining a script on every machine would be painful. I know I could use expect to type the aliases automatically but I was just wondering if OpenSSH has anything built-in that could conceivably be used to achieve this?

Answer 1

There's nothing wrong with doing it in expect. The other way that I've done it is pretty dirty too, with a script, first scp the profile you want to run, then ssh in, run it and stay connected.

So, place all the profile settings in a local file .<local username>-<hostname>-init.sh, and run the script below to log in to the remote host.

#!/bin/sh
[ $# -eq 0 ] && { echo "syntax: $0 <host> [<ssh-option>...]" 1>&2 ; exit 1 ; }
host=$1 ; shift    # use any remaining args as ssh options
initfile=".$USER-`hostname`-init.sh"
scp -q ~/.ssh-init.sh "$host:/var/tmp/$initfile"
ssh -t "$@" $host "bash --rcfile /var/tmp/$initfile"

Answer 2

You could put your configuration in .bashrc and only let them execute when you log in. To make this possible you could pass an environment variable through ssh.

.bashrc modifications

# common stuff
if [ -n "$IAMTHEGREATEST" ]; then
  # my personal cool stuff
fi;
# other global stuff

sshd_config modifications:

AcceptEnv ... IAMTHEGREATEST

.ssh/config modifications (client side):

Host ...
  SendEnv IAMTHEGREATEST

.bashrc modifications (client side):

alias ssh='IAMTHEGREATEST="forsure" ssh'

(untested, but should do)

Answer 3

From the ssh(1) man page, if you create a file ~/.ssh/rc, it will be executed BEFORE the user's login shell is executed, thereby giving the chance to do 'pre-setup' tasks before logging in... the example given was to mount network shares before logging in.

If you don't want to use individual ~/.ssh/rc files, you can do the same with /etc/ssh/sshrc. A quick test to check for your particular username or some identifyiing method could restrict others from even noticing this was in place.

/etc/ssh/sshrc is ONLY sourced if ~/.ssh/rc does not exist, so you can effectively achieve two layers of complexity.

Answer 4

Aliases are defined and interpreted by the shell.

Unfortunately there's no way for ssh to pass them to the remote shell.

You could write an ssh wrapper on the client side that sets up a nice environment on the remote side, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Answer 5

If possible, I would store a small script that initialize/define everything you want on a server accessible from everywhere and execute it after login in each server.

Answer 6

One possible solution would be to put your script that sets everything up on a webserver that all the other servers can access.

Then each server should just need a small script to do something like:

wget http://myserver.com/myawesomescript.sh
chmod +x myawesomescript.sh
./myawesomescript.sh

That way you only have to update it in one place.

Answer 7

Look at .ssh/config

Here is a example https://lookherefirst.wordpress.com/2007/12/17/a-simple-ssh-config-file/