About

Cloud Shell Profiles centralizes your shell profiles and SSH configuration using a cloud sync provider (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Copy, etc) so that they are shared and synchronized between your machines.

The scripts are intended to be used cross-platform and support Linux, macOS and Windows (bash via WSL/MinGW/MSYS/Cygwin), although support for other OSs can be added in easily.

Use cases

I regularly use Windows, macOS and Linux machines and wanted a simple way to keep my shell tooling in sync.

For security reasons, SSH password authentication is disabled on many of the machines I use and I quickly became annoyed at having to maintain all of my keys for personal and work use between several machines.

These scripts avoid all of that by keeping your configuration & keys in one place, new machine setup very easy and any changes to keys or configurations are transferred to all your other machines seamlessly.

Installation

1. Clone this repo into your cloud provider's sync folder (e.g. in ~/Dropbox)
2. On each of the machines you'd like to keep in sync:
   1. Install the desktop sync client of your chosen cloud provider
   2. Copy the contents of local-sample.profile to your ~/.profile file (create it if necessary)
   3. Adjust the CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES variable as necessary to point to the cloud-shell-profiles folder you checked out in step 1
3. Open a new terminal session and type echo $CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES - if all is working, you should see the path configured in step 2-iii!

Configuration

Once you've laid the framework for cloud shell profiles, the rest is up to you.

Shell profiles

Anything placed in common.profile will be sourced on all OSs, where as osx.profile, linux.profile and windows.profile are only sourced when starting a shell on that OS.

I've left a few handy aliases in those files, but feel free to clean those up if you don't want them.

SSH

Check out ssh/config.sample for some examples of cool tricks you can do with a SSH config.

Default alias

I've opted to simply alias ssh as ssh -F "$CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES/ssh/config" on all OSs so the shared SSH configuration (stored at ssh/config in the cloud shell profiles folder) will be used out of the box.

SSH keys via symlink (recommended)

If you have SSH keys, place them in the ssh folder of your cloud shell profiles folder so that they are synchronized between machines.

Changing your .ssh directory to a symbolic link is the easiest way to ensure your SSH configuration and and keys are used consistently between machines:

mv .ssh .ssh.bak
ln -s "$CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES/ssh" ~/.ssh

# This prevent SSH from backing out due to bad permissions
chmod 700 "$CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES"/ssh ~/.ssh
chmod 600 "$CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES"/ssh/*
chmod 644 "$CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES"/ssh/id_*.pub

Now simply use relative paths (i.e. IdentityFile id_rsa_foo) in your SSH config as usual.

SSH keys without symlink (not recommended)

If some of your machines fail when using the symlink approach above, you can still leverage the ssh -F alias to share a config but you will need to specify keys to SSH using one of two approaches:

1. Provide the absolute path to the key each time IdentityFile is used (i.e. IdentityFile ~/Dropbox/cloud-shell-profiles/ssh/id_rsa_foo). This requires you install cloud-shell-profiles at a the same location on all machines.
2. Provide a relative path (i.e. IdentityFile id_rsa_foo) and copy the keys from $CLOUD_SHELL_PROFILES/ssh to ~/.ssh manually. You will be required to manually re-copy every time you add/change a key, but this permits your cloud shell profiles folder to live in different places on different machines.

Extending

autoloader.profile is responsible for loading OS-specific profiles. If your OS is not recognized (e.g. if you use a BSD variant), unmatched.profile is loaded by default with a small warning. Adjust autoloader.profile if you want to load a new OS-specific profile.