Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

By : David Cohen, Christian Sturm
5 (2)
Book Image

The Software Developer's Guide to Linux

5 (2)
By: David Cohen, Christian Sturm

Overview of this book

Developers are always looking to raise their game to the next level, yet most are completely lost when it comes to the Linux command line. This book is the bridge that will take you to the next level in your software development career. Most of the skills in the book can be immediately put to work to make you a more efficient developer. It’s written specifically for software engineers, not Linux system administrators, so each chapter will equip you with just enough theory to understand what you’re doing before diving into practical commands that you can use in your day-to-day work as a software developer. As you work through the book, you’ll quickly absorb the basics of how Linux works while you get comfortable moving around the command line. Once you’ve got the core skills, you’ll see how to apply them in different contexts that you’ll come across as a software developer: building and working with Docker images, automating boring build tasks with shell scripts, and troubleshooting issues in production environments. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to use Linux and the command line comfortably and apply your newfound skills in your day-to-day work to save time, troubleshoot issues, and be the command-line wizard that your team turns to.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
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19
Index

The configuration file

It is possible to specify host configuration in .ssh/config. This can be helpful in various situations, as it allows you to specify:

  • Custom (friendly) names for hosts
  • The default user to use
  • The port
  • Tunnels to open before connecting
  • Identity files (keys)

Among many other things.

Note

If a server you connect to has a permanent IP address, it can make sense to specify it in your SSH config file to avoid relying on DNS or CDNs during a disaster recovery situation.

SSH configuration files aren’t particularly complicated, so we’ll show you an example here that uses many of the available features:

# Set Defaults for all hosts using the glob character (*)Host *
  ServerAliveInterval 30     # Check if the connection is alive every 30 seconds
  ForwardAgent yes           # Forward SSH agent to the remote host
  Compression yes            # Enable compression
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh...