Colored Terminal Over SSH – How to Enable

command linessh

When I connect over ssh to remote hosts everything is just a single font/color. I would like to have colours like I do locally e.g. green for executable and blue for symlinks etc. And such that when I run $ git diff on the ssh host it shows me diff with colours =)

Best Answer

Because it was xterm on the server, I figured something was wrong with .bashrc

And indeed! ls --color=auto works only when you are connected to TTY. Changing everything to simply --color in .bashrc on the remote host and everything is in pretty colours now.

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Note that your /etc/ssh/sshd_config contains the line

 StrictModes yes

Specifies whether sshd should check file modes and ownership of the user's files and home directory before accepting login. This is normally desirable because novices sometimes accidentally leave their directory or files world-writable. The default is ''yes''.

In other words, your home directory ~ on the remote host should be owned and group-owned by you (in this case, this probably means owner htpc and group htpc), and only writable by you (and potentially your group): that means no write in the last ("world") column

$ ls -la ~/
drwxr-xr-x 41 htpc htpc .

Note that the last part says r-x (not world writable), NOT rwx.

If there's a rwx in the last triplet, you need to remove the write rights:

chmod a-w ~

Similarly for the ~/.ssh folder and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. I would recommend chmod 700 ~/.ssh to only grant access to yourself for the folder, and chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for the file.

(Also see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/16981/5477 for more server-side debugging tools)

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