Git with multiple accounts

Consider scenario, where you have two Git accounts on your machine, and want to manage different Github accounts. I assume that you have installed GIt, and created Gihub accounts. You can check my short post about using git with Visual Studio Code: Git things with VSCode.

These are steps which I take in order to accomplish this:

Set up SSH Keys

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "email1@domain.com"
# save it as id_rsa_1
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "email2@domain.com"
# save it as id_rsa_2

Add the keys to your Github accounts

Go to “Account Settings”/ “SSH Keys”/ “Add SSH key”

Create a configuration file to manage the separate keys

Create a ‘config’ file in ~/.ssh/:

# Default GitHub
Host github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_1

# 2nd GitHub
Host github.com-2
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_2

Update stored identities

To automatically load them every time when Bash starts you can edit ‘.bash_profile’ file:

eval $(ssh-agent -s)
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_1
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_2

Choose account

Taking action in Git using second account:

Cloning:

git clone git@github.com-2:UserName/repo.git

Adding

First you have to define user, for convenience on local level:

git config --local user.name "UserName"
git config --local user.email "email2@domain.com"

Things to remember:

1. Github recognises users by e-mail.
2. Each level of Git config (system, global, local) overrides values of the previous one.