SSH UI Script 🖥️

Overview 👀

This script provides a user-friendly dialog-based interface for connecting to SSH hosts defined in your SSH config file. It automatically reads available hosts from ~/.ssh/config and presents them in an interactive menu for easy selection.

Features ✨

• Interactive dialog-based user interface
• Automatically reads and parses SSH hosts from ~/.ssh/config
• Displays a numbered menu of available SSH connections
• Sorts hosts alphabetically for easy navigation
• Clean and simple selection process

Prerequisites 📋

• Linux/Unix-based operating system
• Bash shell
• dialog package installed
• Properly configured ~/.ssh/config file
• SSH client

Installing Dependencies 📦

On Debian/Ubuntu systems:

sudo apt-get install dialog

Usage 🚀

1. Create or Edit Your ~/.ssh/config

2. Enable Auto-Completion in Bash

   echo 'complete -W "$(awk "/^Host[[:space:]]+[^*]/ {print \$2}" ~/.ssh/config)" ssh' >> ~/.bashrc
   source ~/.bashrc

3. To Connect via SSH UI

   apt install dialog

4. Make the script executable:

   chmod +x ssh-ui-script

5. Run the script:

   ./ssh-ui-script

System-Level Command Installation (Optional) ⚙️

If you want to access the SSH UI from anywhere in your system without executing the script manually, you can create a system-level command.

1. Create a symbolic link to make the script accessible system-wide:

   sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/ssh-ui-script" /usr/bin/ui-ssh

2. Now you can launch the SSH UI from anywhere using:

   ui-ssh

This allows you to quickly access your SSH connections menu from any directory without typing the full script path.

Configuration 🔧

The script automatically reads from your SSH config file (~/.ssh/config). Ensure your SSH config file is properly formatted with host entries like:

Host hostname1
    HostName example1.com
    User username1

Host hostname2
    HostName example2.com
    User username2

Resources used to build this 📚

Medium Article