Git – How to Manage Multiple GitHub Accounts on the Same Computer

gitgithubversion-control

Trying to work on both my actual "work" repos, and my repos on GitHub, from my computer.

The work account was set up first, and everything works flawlessly.

My account, however, cannot seem to push to my repo, which is set up under a different account/email.

I've tried copying my work key up to my account, but that throws an error because of course a key can only be attached to one account.

How can I push/pull to and from both accounts with their respective GitHub credentials?

Best Answer

All you need to do is configure your SSH setup with multiple SSH keypairs.

Relevant steps from the first link:

  1. Generate an SSH-key:

    ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]"

    Follow the prompts and decide a name, e.g. id_ed25519_example_company.

  2. Copy the SSH public-key to GitHub from ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_doe_company.pub and tell ssh about the key:

    ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_doe_company

  3. Create a config file in ~/.ssh with the following contents:

    Host github-doe-company
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_doe_company

  4. Add your remote:

    git remote add origin git@github-doe-company:username/repo.git

    or change using:

    git remote set-url origin git@github-doe-company:username/repo.git

Also, if you're working with multiple repositories using different personas, you need to make sure that your individual repositories have the user settings overridden accordingly:

Setting user name, email and GitHub token – Overriding settings for individual repos https://help.github.com/articles/setting-your-commit-email-address-in-git/

Note: Some of you may require different emails to be used for different repositories, from git 2.13 you can set the email on a directory basis by editing the global config file found at: ~/.gitconfig using conditionals like so:

[user]
    name = Default Name
    email = [email protected]

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

And then your work-specific config ~/work/.gitconfig would look like this:

[user]
    name = Pavan Kataria
    email = [email protected]

Thank you @alexg for informing me of this in the comments.

Related Question