Get SSH Protocol Links Working in Ubuntu+Chrome+Unity

This has been plaguing me for years and I finally figured it out. Thanks to eleperte who created ssh-xdg-open, I was finally able to see what to do. Ssh-xdg-open didn’t work for me, but there was enough information available for me to figure out the missing pieces.

Forget about gconftool and you don’t need ssh-xdg-open. If all you want is working ssh://protocol links, then just use xdg-mime to set the default application for handling ssh protocol links and create an application handler with the same name as that application.

xdg-mime default ssh.desktop x-scheme-handler/ssh
cat << EOF > ~/.local/share/applications/ssh.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=SSH Launcher
Exec=bash -c '(URL="%U" HOST="\${URL:6}"; ssh \$HOST); bash'
Terminal=true
Type=Application
Icon=utilities-terminal
EOF

All this does is launch bash, parse the host from the URL and executes ssh. When ssh exits, it executes bash again so the window stays open. I wrote it this way because you can’t count on everything to work all the time and if you don’t keep the window open, the error messages will vanish into the ether and your sanity with them.