The damn ssh manager

Why?

It looks like, that it is really hard to find a ssh connection managing instance for the terminal, that just saves ssh connection details through an alias. There is the .ssh/config where one can of course enter various configuration settings to store ssh connections. How to list all hosts inside this file, so you don't have to remember all of them:

sed -rn ‘s/^\s*Host\s+(.*)\s*/\1/ip’ ~/.ssh/config

Maybe this list does not meet the requirements of the developer/admin. So there it is. A python script that stores ssh connection details. You can even run ssh connections and local tunnels with it ... hell yeah! All your configurations are stored inside the user configuration home directory (for example $HOME/.config/damnsshmanager) inside some pickle files. hosts.pickle is the root of all. Nothing runs without hosts. Local tunnels are based on these hosts, so the following diagram meets these conditions.

classDiagram
    class Host {
        +str alias
        +str addr
        +int port
        +str username
    }
    class LocalTunnel {
        +str alias
        +Host gateway
        +int remote port
        +int local port
        +str destination
    }
    Host *-- "1..*" LocalTunnel

It is all based on a single small file in your home directory called hosts.pickle and localtunnels.pickle under the directory damnsshmanager. One host contains simply the attributes as does the tunnels. Local tunnels are based on saved hosts! No hosts means no local tunnels, so just create one. This way you don't have to specify multiple host connections for every new tunnel. The gateway is equal to the alias used to define the host connection.

Example:

dsm add foo some.strange.host -u hero
dsm ltun --destination example.com bar foo 80
dsm c bar

The first command creates a connection to the strange host. The second one adds a tunnel that runs on example.com to the remote port 80 of the strange host. A local port is, if not specified, automatically chosen by the manager. The last command opens the tunnel. On normal ssh this would mean ssh -L 49152:example.com:80 hero@some.strange.host. Local port range is from 49152 til 65535.

There is a great description on how ssh tunnels work.

At the moment this thing handles no more data! It is developed just for this simple reason.

Installation

via pip

pip install damnsshmanager

from sources

Please install python-poetry for this to work.

git clone https://github.com/captain-proton/damnsshmanager

cd damnsshmanager

poetry build && poetry install

Usage

With the installation comes the script dsm.

dsm -h

When run without parameters all saved instances are tested.