Question

How to keep my SSH connections open?

I have a dedicated server with … another web host. I can log in using SSH, start up a vim or two, fool around, rapid prototype, etc., then come back the next day (or week) and that SSH connection is still open, and my dev environment is still there.

With DO, a SSH connection to my Droplet closes after about 2-3 hours, and certainly won’t last over night.

Is there a setting somewhere to keep SSH connections open?

Show comments

Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Accepted Answer

@jedihawk On one hand you can configure your client to keep the connection alive by sending keep alive packets every few seconds, to do this add this line to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host *
ServerAliveInterval 240

Now your client will send a keep alive packet in all your ssh connections every 240 seconds, make sure the config file has the following permissions 600.

On the other hand you can use tmux which keeps your session alive and enables you to go back for it even after the ssh connection is closed.

Hope this helps.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel