Distinguishing local and remote access in shell (TERM-related)

Question

My default TERM is xterm-color. I would like it to be xterm-256color when I am working on my machine locally, but if I ssh to it I want to have it be xterm-color. How do I distinguish these two cases?

Answer 1

Assuming you're using Bash, in your ~/.bashrc:

if [[ $SSH_TTY ]]
then
    TERM=xterm-color
else
    TERM=xterm-256color
fi
export TERM