Opening multiple SSH sessions with iTerm automatically

Posted at — Jul 16, 2014

iTerm is great, but if you are working with a cluster of servers, it quickly becomes tedious to open an SSH session to each server and to configure splits so you can talk to all servers at once. Based upon the scripts here (but does not use splits) and here (but does not work with 7 servers which I needed in my case), I came up with the following AppleScript that works for me.

-- Launch iTerm and log into multiple servers using SSH
launch application "iTerm"
tell application "iTerm"
    activate

    -- Read serverlist from file path below
    set Servers to paragraphs of (do shell script "/bin/cat $HOME/serverlist")
    set num_hosts to count of Servers
    set current_host to 1
    repeat with nextLine in Servers

        -- If line in file is not empty (blank line) do the rest
        if length of nextLine is greater than 0 then
            set server to "nextLine"
            set term to (current terminal)

            -- Open a new tab
            tell term
                if current_host ≥ num_hosts / 2 then
                    tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "]" using command down
                    tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "D" using {command down, shift down}
                else
                    tell i term application "System Events" to keystroke "d" using command down
                end if

                delay 1

                -- launch session "Default Session"
                tell the current session
                    write text "ssh root@" & nextLine

                    -- sleep to prevent errors if we spawn too fast
                    do shell script "/bin/sleep 0.01"

                end tell

            end tell

        end if

        set current_host to current_host + 1

    end repeat

    -- Close the first tab since we do not need it
    terminate the first session of the current terminal
end tell

The script will launch iTerm and open as many split panes as is needed. The server ip addresses are read from ~/serverlist which you have to populate with the ip addresses of the servers you want to connect to (each on a separate line).

Mobaxterm solves this better I think (but is not available on Mac OS X, only on Windows). They have a single button that allows you to turn the tabs to each server into a split view and back. Would be great if iTerm would also implement this.

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