sshcfgtool

This tool is designed to tame the handling of ~/.ssh/config files.

It can be used to split the config file into multiple files in ~/.ssh/config.d, and generate new config files from a provided ssh command line example.

Usage: sshcfgtool [subcommand] [options]

Subcommands:
  split         Split SSH config into separate files
  translate     Translate SSH command to SSH config entry

Global flags:
  -c, -config string
        Path to the SSH config file
  -n, -dry-run
        Print intentions but don't actually change any files
  -force
        Force overwriting existing files in split subcommand

Splitting

To split your existing ~/.ssh/config into separate files named {host}.conf located in ~/.ssh/config.d:

sshcfgtool split

The existing ~/.ssh/config file will be renamed to ~/.ssh/config.backup and a new config file generated containing Include /home/perry/.ssh/config.d/*.

Translating an SSH command line to a config file entry

To convert an ssh command line to a config file entry, write your usual command after the translate subcommand:

sshcfgtool translate ssh -i ~/.ssh/somekey -A -X -p 2222 user@hostname | tee ~/.ssh/config.d/hostname.conf

For better or worse, the code for this project was primarily written with the guidance of OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-4). It will probably be a very normal thing in a few years. Both Go and Python implementations are available. The Go version is currently the most up-to-date and includes unit tests. However, the final decision on which version will be the primary implementation has not been made.

Development

Test

go test -v

Run

go run ssh_config_tool.go

Build

go build -o sshcfgtool ssh_config_tool.go

Dependencies

Dependencies are managed using Go modules, with dependencies already defined in go.mod.

You don't need to run the commands below, since go run and go build will fetch dependencies as required. For reference this is how the module was initialized and dependencies were installed:

go mod init ssh-config-tool

go get github.com/pmezard/go-difflib/difflib
go get github.com/google/shlex