Useful Notes

Table of contents
  1. Use multiple GitHub accounts with SSH
    1. Generate a new SSH key
    2. Add the new SSH key to GitHub account
    3. Modify config
    4. Local config per repository
    5. Add remote

Use multiple GitHub accounts with SSH

First navigate to ~/.ssh.

For organization, create a directory and name it github. All private and public keys for GitHub connection will be placed here.

Generate a new SSH key

Follow the ssh-keygen prompt. It will ask you to decide on a name for the file, passphrase, etc.

# If Ed25519 algorithm is supported
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_github@email.com"

# Legacy RSA
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_github@email.com"

Add the new SSH key to GitHub account

Easiest part.

Refer to GitHub documentation for step-by-step screencaps.

Modify config

Suppose I have two GitHub accounts each associated with personal_email@address.com and work_email@address.com.

I’ll assume the private keys are named github-personal and github-work respectively.

Now append the following to ~/.ssh/config

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

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

You can define custom host for both as such or have one of them keep the default github.com.

Local config per repository

First start a local repo with

git init

Then config local name and email that will be used for that repo

git config --local user.name "work_name"
git config --local user.email "work_email@address.com"

Add remote

Normally you would add an ssh remote by

git remote add origin git@github.com:github_username:repo_name
# OR
git remote add origin github.com:github_username:repo_name

But this time,

git remote add origin github-work:work_username:repo_name

References: