Supporting Multiple Git/Github Accounts

Many times, especially when working as a freelance developer, you’ll need access to multiple Github repositories. Most likely, you will be using different Github accounts, so you’ll need to tell git which account to use. To do this, you’ll need to configure your ~/.ssh/config and ~/.gitconfig accordingly.

I won’t go into great detail in this post, as there already is really good documentation here on how to configure ssh for Github.

After generating the needed ssh keys, I setup my ~/.ssh/config like so:

Host personal
   HostName github.com
   User git
   AddKeysToAgent yes
   IdentitiesOnly yes
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_not_work

Host work
   HostName github.com
   User git
   AddKeysToAgent yes
   IdentitiesOnly yes
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_work

In my ~/.gitconfig, I do something like:

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

Then, in each config, I do something like this:

[user]
   name = Walter Manger
   email = {some-email}@{some-domain}.com

So, when I want to clone a Github repository, I can do something like:

git clone git@{work or personal}:{some organization}/{some repo}.git

Now, If I am in ~/repos/work, git will use the user settings defined in ~/.gitconfig-work.