WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud
  • Tanzu
    • Application Modernization
    • Tanzu services
    • Tanzu Community Edition
    • Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
    • vSphere with Tanzu
  • Home Lab
  • Nested Virtualization
  • Apple

Quick Tip - How to Change ESXi SSH Prompt

07.18.2013 by William Lam // 3 Comments

This quick tip was motivated by a comment from Jason Nash where he wished the hostname of an ESXi host is automatically displayed on the SSH prompt when logging into the system. Traditionally, systems providing SSH access will default the SSH prompt to use the format of [[email protected] current-working-directory], but for an ESXi host, it just displays the current working directory.

This is not that big of an issue, unless you have multiple connections opened up to various systems which is usually the case for the average System Administrator. Being able to quickly identify the host you on are without having to run the hostname command would be nice and I can see why Jason would want to have this. Having said that, this is something you can easily configure on ESXi as well as other UNIX/Linux system in terms of customizing the SSH prompt.

To change the SSH prompt on ESXi, you will need to edit /etc/profile.local configuration file and add PS1 environmental variable which controls the SSH prompt. The configuration file is automatically backed up and all changes will persist through a reboot.

If you want to enable the basic [[email protected] current-working-directory], add the following to the file:

PS1="[\[email protected]\h:\w] "

Now when you login to your ESXi host, the SSH prompt will look like this:

You can even add colors to your SSH prompt, if you add the following to the file:

PS1="\e[0;41m[\[email protected]\h \W]\$ \e[m"

It will look like this:

The above are just examples of the customization you can apply to the SSH prompt, for more options you can take a look at this reference or search for others online. You can also quickly test your changes by just setting the PS1 variable on the command-line and then logging in.

Since this is something that has annoyed me from time to time, I will be filing a Feature Request with engineering and hopefully we can have this as a default in the future. Thanks Jason for bringing this up!

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxi, prompt, ssh

Search

Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

Connect

  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • Blocking vSphere HTML5 VM Console and allowing only Standalone VM Remote Console (VMRC)? 02/08/2023
  • Quick Tip - Inventory core count for vSphere+, vSAN+ & VCF+ Cloud Service 02/07/2023
  • How to automate adding a license into vCenter Server with custom label?  02/06/2023
  • Automated ESXi Installation with a USB Network Adapter using Kickstart 02/01/2023
  • How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh? 01/31/2023

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2023