How do I make the apple terminal window auto change colour scheme when I ssh to a specific server

Question

When I ssh into a remote production server I would like the colour scheme of my terminal window to change to something brigh and scary, preferably red, to warn me that I am touching a live scary server.

How can I make it automatically detect that I have ssh'ed somewhere, and if that somewhere is on a specific list, change the colour scheme?

I want to update the Scheme of Terminal.app, not know how I would do this in a pure linux/unix env

Answer 1

Put following script in ~/bin/ssh (ensure ~/bin/ is checked before /usr/bin/ in your PATH):

#!/bin/sh  HOSTNAME=`echo $@ | sed s/.*@//`  set_bg () {   osascript -e "tell application \"Terminal\" to set background color of window 1 to $1" }  on_exit () {   set_bg "{0, 0, 0, 50000}" } trap on_exit EXIT  case $HOSTNAME in   production1|production2|production3) set_bg "{45000, 0, 0, 50000}" ;;   *) set_bg "{0, 45000, 0, 50000}" ;; esac  /usr/bin/ssh "$@" 

Remember to make the script executable by running chmod +x ~/bin/ssh

The script above extracts host name from line "username@host" (it assumes you login to remote hosts with "ssh user@host").

Then depending on host name it either sets red background (for production servers) or green background (for all other). As a result all your ssh windows will be with colored background.

I assume here your default background is black, so script reverts the background color back to black when you logout from remote server (see "trap on_exit").

Please, note however this script does not track chain of ssh logins from one host to another. As a result the background will be green in case you login to testing server first, then login to production from it.

Answer 2

A lesser-known feature of Terminal is that you can set the name of a settings profile to a command name and it will select that profile when you create a new terminal via either Shell > New Command… or Shell > New Remote Connection….

For example, duplicate your default profile, name it “ssh” and set its background color to red. Then use New Command… to run ssh host.example.com.

It also matches on arguments, so you can have it choose different settings for different remote hosts, for example.