Nikita Kazakov
Nikita Kazakov
1 min read

Tags

Have you ssh’d into a production server and had no idea what to do next? For example, I ssh’d into a production Rails server but didn’t know how to access Rails console. It wasn’t straight forward. I was met with a black screen and a white cursor.

When you ssh into a server, a motd (message of the day) comes up. It’s typically showing server stats. You can modify it to show a descriptive welcome message.

On Ubuntu either find or create a motd file in /etc. Let’s open and add something to it with nano.

cd /etc
touch motd
nano motd

Save the file, close the terminal and ssh into the server again. You’ll see the motd on screen. In my case:

# /etc/motd
Welcome to Production Server 1/3.
==Shortcuts==
Rails Console: rails_console
Project Folder: rails_folder

That’s a much better motd message and the user is no longer lost.

Want to make it really spiffy? Add a title from the ASCII Art Generator. Now you’re a real hax0r.

  ___            _               ___
 |   \  ___  __ | |__ ___  _ _  / __| ___  _ _ __ __ ___  _ _
 | |) |/ _ \/ _|| / // -_)| '_| \__ \/ -_)| '_|\ V // -_)| '_|
 |___/ \___/\__||_\_\\___||_|   |___/\___||_|   \_/ \___||_|


Welcome to Production Server 1/3.
==Shortcuts==
Rails Console: rails_console
Project Folder: rails_folder

I use motd locally on my machine to remember alias shortcuts I’ve made. If you’re using zsh on MacOS, the motd file needs to be created in /etc/motd.

Here’s a glimpse of what a piece of it looks like on my machine.

-----------------------------------------
| Change Message | sudo nano /etc/motd  |
| Change Aliases | nano ~/.zshrc        |
-----------------------------------------
| ssh dokku vps  | ssh_docker           |
| kill rails s   | kill_rails_server    |