Multiple Github Accounts

This is useful when you have multiple accounts for github or any other git repo provider on the same machine (ex: Work and Personal accounts).

The concept is that we need to:

• Generate different SSH keys for each account
• Add ssh keys to ~/.ssh/config with separate hosts
• Add condition to .gitconfig to use certain user for a certain directory for example
• We pull the repo using a specific host name (not the domain)

Steps:

1. Generate SSH keys:

1ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "<email_address>"

1. Add the keys to ~/.ssh/config:

Host github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Host github.com-personal
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_personal

1. Add the condition to .gitconfig:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/work/"]
  path = .gitconfig-work

Then create a .gitconfig-work file with the following content:

[user]
  email = <email_address>
  name = <name>
[core]
    sshCommand = "ssh -i /path/to/work/ssh/file -o IdentitiesOnly=yes"

1. Clone the repo using the specific host:

1git clone git@github.com:repo_org/repo_name.git

For the personal account:

1git clone git@github.com-personal:repo_org/repo_name.git

and afterwards, you can use git commands normally and it will know which credentials to use.