Handling Multiple Github Accounts on MacOS
The only way I've succeeded so far is to employ SSH.
Assuming you are new to this like me, first I'd like to share with you that your Mac has a SSH config
file in a .ssh
directory. The config
file is where you draw relations of your SSH keys to each GitHub (or Bitbucket) account, and all your SSH keys generated are saved into .ssh
directory by default. You can navigate to it by running cd ~/.ssh
within your terminal, open the config
file with any editor, and it should look something like this:
Host * AddKeysToAgent yes UseKeyChain yes IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa ForwardAgent yes
Assuming you've got 2 github accounts, for work and play, lets get your Mac to "register" them. To do that that you'll need to create SSH key pairs for each account. If you have already setup your Mac to SSH with one of them, or check if you have one, continue on with the following for the second account.
1. Creating the SSH keys. For each SSH key pairs:
-
run
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"
-
You'll be prompted: "Enter a file in which to save the key" and the suggested default filename would be
id_rsa
. This filename will be used for your SSH private and public keys so remember to make it unique, eg.user-1
,user-2
. This step will generate both the private and public keys,user-1
+user-1.pub
,user-2
+user-2.pub
respectively. -
GitHub has this step in detail. We're not adding the keys to the ssh-agent.
2. Register your keys to the respective GitHub accounts.
- Follow these steps to do so.
config
file at ~/.ssh
and amend accordingly to:
3. Head back over to the SSH #user1 account Host github.com-user1 HostName github.com User git IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github-user1 IdentitiesOnly yes #user2 account Host github.com-user2 HostName github.com User git IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github-user2 IdentitiesOnly yesReplace
user1
oruser2
with your GitHub usernames/identification-handlers
4. Go ahead to git clone your respective repository
git clone git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git your-repo-name_user1
5. Configure your git identity:
- Open up local git config using
git config --local -e
and add:
[user] name = user1 email = user1@gmail.com
git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git your-repo-name_user1
6. Ensure your remote url is in the right format e.g: - You either run
git remote set-url origin git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git your-repo-name_user1
- Or amend your remote ssh-url in your local git config file:
[remote "origin"] url = git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
Now you can git actions (pull/push/fetch...etc) all you like!
Resources:
Special thanks to @pbuditi for your help!
Thank you! I was missing Step #6 as you mentioned. I had to set which user I wanted to use in the url ->
git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git your-repo-name_user1