iTerm Posts

Every day, when I get to work, there are a number of tasks I do. Among the first thing I do is connect to a number of servers via SSH. These servers - our development testing, staging, and code rolling servers - are part of the development infrastructure at dealnews. So every morning, I launch iTerm, make three sessions and log into the various servers. Over time, I’ve written some helper scripts to make this faster. My “go” script contains the SSH commands (using keys) to log into these machines so that all I have to do is type “go rpeck” to log into my development machine. Still, this morning, the lunacy of every morning having to open iTerm and execute three commands, every day without fail, struck me. Why not script this so that, when my laptop is plugged into the network at work, it automatically launches iTerm and logs me into the relevant services? Fortunately, iTerm exposes a pretty complete set of AppleScript commands, so with a little work, I was able to come up with this: tell application "System Events" set appWasRunning to exists (processes where name is "iTerm") tell application "iTerm" activate if not appWasRunning then terminate the first session of the first terminal end if set myterm to (make new terminal) tell myterm set dev_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell dev_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go rpeck" end tell set staging_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell staging_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go staging2" end tell set nfs_session to (make new session at the end of sessions) tell nfs_session exec command "/Volumes/iDisk/bin/go nfs" end tell select dev_session end tell end tell end tell What this little script does is, when launched, checks to see if an instance of iTerm is already running. If it is, it just creates a new window, otherwise creates the first window, then connects to the relevant services using my “go” script (which is synchronized across all my Macs by MobileMe). Then, with it saved, I wrap it in a shell script: #!/bin/bash /usr/bin/osascript /Users/peckrob/Scripts/launch-iterm.scpt And launch it with MarcoPolo using my “Work” rule that is executed when my computer arrives at Work. Works great!