warp

Imagine if you could SSH somewhere by picking a hostname from a list.

Now you can:

warp is a script that reads a file (~/.warp) and displays it in VIM. When you press enter, you SSH to the hostname under the cursor.

If you select multiple lines, it opens cluster SSH (csshX).

Why?

If you have a bunch of servers you can SSH to, think about how you manage that now:

you TYPE the hostname, maybe relying on bash completion?
you create a BUNCH of aliases, with varying level of sophistication, based on how many hostnames?

Picking from a list solves all that.

How?

Create the file ~/.warp and put one hostname per line.

Like this:

example.com
www@example.com
anotherBox:2222 # with port

# AMAZON

-- production useast
app10.useast1.ec2.example.com
app11.useast1.ec2.example.com
app12.useast1.ec2.example.com
-- production uswest
app10.uswest1.ec2.example.com
app11.uswest1.ec2.example.com -- deprecated
app12.uswest1.ec2.example.com

# LOCAL

tv
router
192.168.0.5 -- laptop

The simplest format is one hostname per line. When you press enter, only the first column (awk '{print $1}') is taken as the hostname.

This also means, if you DON'T press enter on a line, it can be whatever you want: it can be blank or contain comments. This can greatly help with the visual organization of the file. I like to put headers, separators and notes all over the file.

What happens if you press enter on a line that's not a hostname? It will try to SSH there and it won't work ... don't do that :-)

If you visually select (shift-v) multiple lines, cluster SSH (csshX) will be used to SSH to them.

Any VIM movement commands will work, this is regular VIM after all. I recommend searching with regular expressions, but using line numbers is good too.

VIM is started with the content of ~/.warp, but you can modify the buffer before making a selection -- changes will NOT be saved back to ~/.warp. This is useful if you want to SSH to multiple hosts that are not on lines following each other: just slice and dice the file, put the lines together, add or modify something, select them and press enter.

An alternative file to choose hostnames from can be specified by passing the location of the file as the first argument to the script.

What about ports or other host-specific config?

I think the right solution for this is the put your host-specific config in your $HOME/.ssh/config:

Host somewhere
  Hostname somewhere.com
  Port 5656
  User bob
  # etc...

The syntax is simple, it goes with your other SSH config, and it configures your other SSH-backed commands like scp, rsync, and cluster SSH.

But you can also use hostname:port or even user@hostname:port in the warp file if you want to keep things simple.

Warp as an executable

Put warp somewhere in your $PATH. This is simple but it won't be able to modify your history: your bash history will say warp without indications of where you warped to.

See below.

Warp as a bash script

Add source PATH/TO/warp in your .bashrc. Now you can warp: reload your shell, type warp, press enter. A function was added to your shell.

warp will modify the history to contain the SSH command (as if you typed it) rather than warp.

Contributors

Thanks to the following people for helping me out:

Daniel T (@r0b0tbuilder)
Daniel Morrison (@dmorrison42)
David Chapman (@dchapman1988)