Multiple SSH keys for different github accounts

multiple_ssh_setting.md

Multiple SSH Keys settings for different github account

create different public key

create different ssh key according the article Mac Set-Up Git

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@youremail.com"

Please refer to github ssh issues for common problems.

for example, 2 keys created at:

~/.ssh/id_rsa_activehacker
~/.ssh/id_rsa_jexchan

then, add these two keys as following

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_activehacker
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_jexchan

you can delete all cached keys before

$ ssh-add -D

finally, you can check your saved keys

$ ssh-add -l

Modify the ssh config

$ cd ~/.ssh/
$ touch config
$ subl -a config

Then added

#activehacker account
Host github.com-activehacker
	HostName github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_activehacker

#jexchan account
Host github.com-jexchan
	HostName github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_jexchan

Clone you repo and modify your Git config

clone your repo git clone git@github.com:activehacker/gfs.git gfs_jexchan

cd gfs_jexchan and modify git config

$ git config user.name "jexchan"
$ git config user.email "jexchan@gmail.com" 

$ git config user.name "activehacker"
$ git config user.email "jexlab@gmail.com" 

or you can have global git config $ git config --global user.name "jexchan" $ git config --global user.email "jexchan@gmail.com"

then use normal flow to push your code

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "your comments"
$ git push

Another related article in Chinese

1. http://4simple.github.com/docs/multipleSSHkeys/

Anyone who is having a problem like in which I followed the instruction on Mac, for some reason when I was attempting to push into the repo from my second account, git was using my first account and I was getting permission denied error, after spending few hours this answer finally helped me https://stackoverflow.com/a/12438179/12702093.

this is how my ~/.ssh/config looks like this

when I am working with my personal account, I use ssh clone like this git@github.com:maazu:repo clone command and when I am using a company account I just clone by git clone repo link

# Company Github Account
Host company.github.com
  HostName github.com
  User github_username
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
  IdentitiesOnly yes

# Github.com-personal
Host personal.github.com
  HostName github.com
  User maazu
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_personal 
  IdentitiesOnly yes

You can add this to an existing repo by doing the following:
git config --get remote.origin.url

Which will give you something like:

git@github.com:HughAJWood/repo

Copy and modify the resulting url as so:

git@github.com-<sshId>:HughAJWood/repo
ie
git@github.com-hugh:HughAJWood/repo

This should match the id in the .ssh/config file

# Personal account - the default config
Host github.com-hugh
   HostName github.com
   User git
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/personal_private_key

I had to change the [remote "origin"] / url field in my local .git/config to use the Host defined in .ssh/config in order for this to work, i.e.,

[remote "origin"]
        url = git@github.com-activehacker:activehacker/gfs.git

Without that modification, git would just try to use my default ssh key.

Thanks @oleweidner

Yeah, Even I had to make this change to get it working.

every time I want to interact with a second git account I need to explicitly provide a path to keys: like GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/personal" git push origin master

I had to remove the wildcard Host * section from the .ssh/config file

Below are the ~/.gitconfig aliases which could clone with specific github.com replacement and change remote origin URL of existing repo

[alias]
  clc = "!f(){ git clone `sed 's/github.com/github.com-work/g' <<< \"$1\"`;};f"
  Cld = "!f(){ git clone `sed 's/github.com/github.com-default/g' <<< \"$1\"`;};f"
  urlc = "!f(){ git config remote.origin.url `git config remote.origin.url | sed 's/github.com/github.com-work/g'`;};f"
  urld = "!f(){ git config remote.origin.url `git config remote.origin.url | sed 's/github.com/github.com-default/g'`;};f"

use it like git cld github.com/repo to clone repo and replace github.com host to github.com-default automatically

I had to change the [remote "origin"] / url field in my local .git/config to use the Host defined in .ssh/config in order for this to work, i.e.,

[remote "origin"]
        url = git@github.com-activehacker:activehacker/gfs.git

Without that modification, git would just try to use my default ssh key.

Thanks!!! working perfectly.

This instructions are great, however for people like me who had a general host configured in .shh/config, you need to make it not generic.

My old .shh/config was:

Host *
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Following the instructions above I ended up with:

Host github.troccoli
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/troccoli
Host *
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

But when pushing to my personal repository I had the following error:

ERROR: Permission to troccoli/tubecrush.git denied to CLL-GTA.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

Where CLL-GTA is my work git account.

The solution was to make the general host not general any more:

Host github.troccoli
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/troccoli
Host work
  HostName github.com:****
  AddKeysToAgent yes
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

The **** is actually my company account on GitHub. To find it, I just looked in the .git/config file in any of the repositories I cloned for work.

I hope this helps.

According to ssh documentation, we need set a appropriate value for User in the config file.
git clone git@github.com:githubAccountName/repoName.git

config file:

Host github.com
   HostName github.com
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_personal
   User githubAccountName

@Ronghaozhang This is incorrect. The User in the ssh config file is the user with which you connect to/log into the remote server, which is git by default. Compare with the Git URLs provided by platforms like GitHub, GitLab etc. for SSH access, e.g. git@github.com:github/docs.git. The part before the colon translates to user@hostname. See the man page for ssh for more details.

If you had tried out your suggestion before posting it, you would have known it doesn't work – GitHub will return a permission error if you try to connect with a user other than git.

Btw. the link you included needs to be reformatted. It doesn't point to where you wanted it to go, but only displays the address.

An update to this after spending too long on it. My scenario was that I had originally set up my ssh config like so:

Host github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github
  IdentitiesOnly yes
  AddKeysToAgent yes

I had cloned tons of repos using this config, so I could not use the option of setting different hosts, because there were too many repos to update. What I needed to do was be able to push/pull for one repo using a different identity file, so I tried doing this in that one repo:
git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i ~/.ssh/matt2930-github -o 'IdentitiesOnly=yes'"

But what happened was no matter what, it was still using the identity file I had defined in my ~/.ssh/config. What saved me was adding -F /dev/null to my ssh command:
git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i ~/.ssh/matt2930-github -o 'IdentitiesOnly=yes' -F /dev/null"

From man ssh:

 -F configfile
         Specifies an alternative per-user configuration file.  If a configuration file is given on the command line, the system-wide configuration file (/etc/ssh/ssh_config) will be ignored.  The default for the
         per-user configuration file is ~/.ssh/config.  If set to “none”, no configuration files will be read.

@Ronghaozhang This is incorrect. The User in the ssh config file is the user with which you connect to/log into the remote server, which is git by default. Compare with the Git URLs provided by platforms like GitHub, GitLab etc. for SSH access, e.g. git@github.com:github/docs.git. The part before the colon translates to user@hostname. See the man page for ssh for more details.

If you had tried out your suggestion before posting it, you would have known it doesn't work – GitHub will return a permission error if you try to connect with a user other than git.

Btw. the link you included needs to be reformatted. It doesn't point to where you wanted it to go, but only displays the address.

Thanks for pointing out the link issue. Before saying it's doesn't work, I'm not sure you have tried my method, it's working perfectly on my laptop, for both my personal account and working account.

Also, this is the screenshot from Github documentation, it pointed out the part after the colon is the user.

Here the link: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-started-with-git/about-remote-repositories

@Ronghaozhang The user on GitHub, which identifies a repository owner, has nothing to do with the user used for SSH, which is what you set when you provide a value for User in the ssh config. Again, see the man page for ssh to learn how ssh works.

GitHub even describes how to test your connection in their docs:
Testing your SSH connection
Error: Permission denied (publickey)

You will not not get a permission error when you provide an SSH user that is not git and test your connection as described.

The reason you think "it works" – by which I assume you mean fetching, pulling, pushing etc. – is likely that you continue to use the correct user git@ in your remote URLs, which overrides the User variable in the config file.

Nice, I am done with the above configuration.

Now, how to push my new project code to my personal account if I am using two GitHub accounts?

This seems straight-lined too 8 Easy Steps to Set Up Multiple GitHub Accounts

change the default host from "github.com" to "github.com-activehacker", then the ssh will recognize your ssh key which defined in ssh config.

ssh -T git@github.com-activehacker
git clone <Host in ssh config>:<github username>/<github repo name>.git
git clone github.com-activehacker:activehacker/mygit.git
git clone github.com-jexchan:jexchan/mygit.git

sshCommand

Good catch! Defining the sshCommand is not described in most of the guides I've seen.

In case you have for instance two separate Github accounts and two separate projects (project A and project B) you'd like to have two separate ssh-keys for:

1. Open an A project's .git/config file
2. Add

  [core]
     ...
    sshCommand = ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_first_key

3. Do the same for your project B with ~/.ssh/id_second_key

I'm sharing mine .ssh/config file, hope it helps someone(working fine on MacOS BigSur)

Then you have to add your private key ssh agent as below: ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/work

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/altif In final step, you can confirm the connection using below command and get below output if everything setup correctly.

MAltif1M-BNG1:~ Mohammad.Altif$ ssh -T work

Hi <github_username>! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

MAltif1M-BNG1:~ Mohammad.Altif$ ssh -T altif

Hi <github_username>! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

+1, Thanks for sharing this.

If after applying this gist one is still experiencing the problem in Android Studio, try unchecking "use credential helper" parameter in Settings -> Version Control -> Git. That helped me.

sshCommand

Good catch! Defining the sshCommand is not described in most of the guides I've seen.

In case you have for instance two separate Github accounts and two separate projects (project A and project B) you'd like to have two separate ssh-keys for:

1. Open an A project's `.git/config` file

2. Add

  [core]
     ...
    sshCommand = ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_first_key

3. Do the same for your project B with `~/.ssh/id_second_key`

If only git had a url.<base>.sshCommand like https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-urlltbasegtinsteadOf then this whole problem could be simple in the global git config

[url "ssh://git@github.com/org1"]
  sshCommand = ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_org1
[url "ssh://git@github.com/org2"]
  sshCommand = ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_org2

come to think of it url fields for name, email, and signingkey would eliminate a lot of manual overriding

I had to remove the wildcard Host * section from the .ssh/config file

Hot tip

I had to remove the wildcard Host * section from the .ssh/config file

You shouldn't have to remove it. Add it to the end (assuming there is anything you want to apply to all hosts). The order of precedence in that config file always confuses me.

Mine looks like this:

## GIT
Host placeholder.github.com github
User git
LogLevel INFO
Hostname github.com
IdentitiesOnly yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/placeholder.id_ed25519
...
## Applied to all...
Host *
ServerAliveInterval 240
ServerAliveCountMax 2
ForwardX11 no

You can use this https://github.com/adminka-root/git_switcher

I've also written a pretty good Gist about another approach:
https://gist.github.com/yinzara/bbedc35798df0495a4fdd27857bca2c1

After digging for a while here's the issue I found and the fix:

This is the config file for ssh located @ ~/.ssh/config

#BitBucket Account
Host bb_work
	HostName bitbucket.org
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_work

#Personal account
Host gh_personal
	HostName github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gh_personal

And this is the config file for the remote repo:

[remote "origin"]
      url = gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git
      fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

You can notice that I have changed my remote repo URL from: git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git to gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git

How this works:

You'd like to establish an ssh connection to the GitHub server to read/write the data to your repo for that you have created the key by reading the above article.

Now whenever you do a git pull/push or whenever you want to establish a connection to GitHub using the git command

It will check your ssh config file to check if the host is defined with git@github.com but it will find nothing.

So it won't be able to shake the earlier created private and public keys.

So in order to do that we have to change our repo URL("git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git ") to the HOST value (gh_personal) set in ~/.ssh/config

After digging for a while here's the issue I found and the fix:

This is the config file for ssh located @ ~/.ssh/config

#BitBucket Account
Host bb_work
	HostName bitbucket.org
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_work

#Personal account
Host gh_personal
	HostName github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gh_personal

And this is the config file for the remote repo:

[remote "origin"]
      url = gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git
      fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

You can notice that I have changed my remote repo URL from: git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git to gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git

How this works:

You'd like to establish an ssh connection to the GitHub server to read/write the data to your repo for that you have created the key by reading the above article.

Now whenever you do a git pull/push or whenever you want to establish a connection to GitHub using the git command

It will check your ssh config file to check if the host is defined with git@github.com but it will find nothing.

So it won't be able to shake the earlier created private and public keys.

So in order to do that we have to change our repo URL("git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git ") to the HOST value (gh_personal) set in ~/.ssh/config

Hey I followed this instruction but I still get ssh: Could not resolve hostname github.com-work: nodename nor servname provided, or not known
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

I already added my public key to github too

After digging for a while here's the issue I found and the fix:
This is the config file for ssh located @ ~/.ssh/config

#BitBucket Account
Host bb_work
	HostName bitbucket.org
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bb_work

#Personal account
Host gh_personal
	HostName github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gh_personal

And this is the config file for the remote repo:

[remote "origin"]
      url = gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git
      fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

You can notice that I have changed my remote repo URL from: git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git to gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git
How this works:
You'd like to establish an ssh connection to the GitHub server to read/write the data to your repo for that you have created the key by reading the above article.
Now whenever you do a git pull/push or whenever you want to establish a connection to GitHub using the git command
It will check your ssh config file to check if the host is defined with git@github.com but it will find nothing.
So it won't be able to shake the earlier created private and public keys.
So in order to do that we have to change our repo URL("git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git ") to the HOST value (gh_personal) set in ~/.ssh/config

Hey I followed this instruction but I still get ssh: Could not resolve hostname github.com-work: nodename nor servname provided, or not known fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

I already added my public key to github too

Your repo name should be changed from
git@github.com:abhisri1997/mailer.git
this to
this - gh_personal:abhisri1997/mailer.git

From the error you get I can still see github.com-work:

Change this to your ssh host

munging your .git/config remote is just going to end up being a hassle in the long run.

trust me, been there done that, never doing it again tomorrow.

the. most. portable. way is to setup your root gitconfig so that it uses the includeif.

edit: like mentioned here:
https://gist.github.com/jexchan/2351996?permalink_comment_id=4456452#gistcomment-4456452

---

The includeif stanza/directive modifies your git config on the fly based on the CWD of the git operation.
Relevant to this thread, this is where we can teach git about the ssh_command, which is where you point to your shiny unique ssh key.

The end result is a set of dotfiles ~/.gitconfig, ~/.dotfiles/this.gitconfig, ~/.dotfiles/that.gitconfig you can carry around and a directory structure for your ~/Projects

~/.gitconfig

[core]
	editor = DISPLAY=:1 code --wait

[init]
	defaultBranch = master

[rerere]
	enabled = true

[includeIf "gitdir:Projects/Mine/Gitlab/"]
        path = ~/.dotfiles/mine-gitlab.gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:Projects/Mine/Github/"]
        path = ~/.dotfiles/mine-github.gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:Projects/Experiements/Github/"]
        path = ~/.dotfiles/mine-github.gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:Projects/Work/Github/SomeCompany"]
        path = ~/.dotfiles/work-somecompany.gitconfig

Personal Configs

~/.dotfiles/mine-gitlab.gitconfig

[user]
name = My Name
email = other.e@ma.il

~/.dotfiles/mine-github.gitconfig

[user]
name = My Name
email = mygithubusername@users.noreply.github'com
signingkey = DEADBEEF

[commit]
gpgsign = true

[gpg]
program = age

For the above, any git operations occurring within a path that matches either:

• Projects/Mine/Gitlab/
• Projects/Mine/GitHub/, or
• Projects/Experiements/Github/

will use my github config.

Work Configs

~/.dotfiles/work-github-somecompany.gitconfig

[core]
sshCommand = "ssh -o IdentitiesOnly -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa-mymachinename-github-somecompany -F /dev/null"

For the above, any git operation occuring in a directory that matches Projects/Work/Github/SomeCompany will specifically use a different ssh key despite my ~/.ssh/config declaring another for other general github ssh connections. The -o IdentitiesOnly tells ssh to use only the private key specified with the "-i" option and ignore any other keys in the SSH agent or on the remote server.

---

The main reasons I love this setup :

can just copy paste a github git repo url with wild abandon and paste it without having to remember the magical things to modify.

don't have to do anything in the ~/.ssh/config since what we really wanted this for was git and nothing else.

You can use this https://github.com/adminka-root/git_switcher

Boss, can you develop a GUI software if you are free? It's like switchHost. It's convenient.

Boss, can you develop a GUI software if you are free? It's like switchHost. It's convenient.

I needed to switch between accounts as part of a training session for children to show how development works in a team. I wrote a quick solution that I don't use in my daily life. I agree that it would be nicer with a GUI and a tray icon. But I'm busy enough to do it. I can recommend Glade and Vala or PyGTK, which will allow you to quickly create a modern interface on gtk. You could develop the interface yourself, and my source code would probably speed up the process.