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Shorten SSH Commands With Aliases

unix Written November 12, 2025

Each time I need to SSH into one of my remote app boxes, like staging, I run a command like the following:

$ ssh root@staging-box.com

Instead of having to remember the user and domain, I can add aliases to my ~/.ssh/config file.

# Staging Server
Host staging
    HostName staging-box.com
    User root

# Sandbox Server
Host sandbox
    HostName sandbox-box.com
    User root

Then I can SSH to each of these like so:

$ ssh staging

$ ssh sandbox

These aliases help a little bit, but they will help even more in situations where I need other settings configured for the SSH sessions like Port or ForwardAgent.

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