How I easily manage my servers on Mac

When you’re a freelance or a business owner, and you or your clients have web products/services online, you have a lot of servers to handle.

Shuttle, a simple SSH shortcut menu on OSX

My secret is Shuttle, a free open-source software that brings a SSH shortcut menu on my MacBook Pro.

Server management

Shuttle manage your servers in a .shuttle.json file.

So, you set your servers in JSON format.

For information, here’s the default .shuttle.json file.

You need to specify 2 keys for a server:

• cmd: the cmd to launch (usually ssh [email protected] -p 1234)
• name: the name of the server that appears on Shuttle

You can specify folders and sub folders for your servers.

Personally, I created 3 folders:

• Home : to access to my DiskStation Synology NAS
• Personal : to access to the servers hosting my own projects
• Clients > Name of my client : to access to my client’s servers

Hint: you can add emojis in your server folders and names to help you recognize them quickly 👍.

Personalization

This is a simple software, but you can personalize it.

I only changed 2 settings.

• I use iTerm2 as my default terminal
• I launch Shuttle at login

Of course, if you want more information about Shuttle options, you can read the documentation.

Synchronization

OK, so, as we saw above, the settings and the servers are specified in a .shuttle.json.

It could be very useful if we could synchronize it in the cloud, don't you think?

Recommended method

The documentation shows that we can change the JSON path.

You just have to create a .shuttle.path file in your home directory and insert the path of the JSON settings file.

Then, you can specify a folder synchronised with your Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/… account.

Alternative method

Unfortunately, I try to change the .shuttle.json path but it didn’t work for me.

I use iCloud to sync my folder, so maybe the problem is specific to this service because of the weird path (there is a space in the path for iCloud).

For information, iCloud folder path is:

~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

So, I simply used an alternative method to sync my .shuttle.json file, and this method consists in replacing the file by a symbolic link.

I moved my .shuttle.json file in a specific iCloud folder for Shuttle:

$ mkdir /Users/clement/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Shuttle
$ mv .shuttle.json /Users/clement/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Shuttle

Then I created the symbolic link in my home directory:

$ ln -s /Users/clement/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Shuttle/.shuttle.json .

My Shuttle setting file is now synchronised with my iCloud account!

This was a quick presentation of Shuttle, and how I manage the servers for my projects and my clients. I hope you would find my method interesting and maybe you would use this awesome app for managing your servers!