Using Multiple GitHub Accounts

Why would you need more than one GitHub account?

Ideally, having a single GitHub account with contributions to multiple organizations would be the simplest way. As it turns out, my current job came with a separate GitHub account. So now I have two GitHub accounts, one for personal projects and another for work. The problem I was running into was trying to keep my commits tied with the right GitHub ssh key. Luckily, git and ssh are configurable enough to get this sorted out.

Through some simple googling, I found Jeffery Way’s blog post. The steps I outlined below is what I did to get this setup on my Mac. More details can be found on Jeffery’s blog.

The following steps assume that you already have an existing key you use with one of your github accounts. For the purpose of this writeup, the default id_rsa key is associated with your personal GitHub account.

Creating and adding ssh keys

A ssh key will be needed to use with the work GitHub account. In your ~/.ssh directory, run the following ssh command: ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "me@mycompany.com"

Rename the key to something else, for this example I went with, id_rsa_mycompany and id_rsa_mycompany.pub (private and public keys respectively).

Add the key to ssh: ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa_mycompany

Setting up GitHub with your new ssh key

Now add the new public key to the work GitHub account (this will be under your GitHub account settings). Open the id_rsa_mycompany.pub public key file in a text editor and copy the text. Or just copy directly from the terminal: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa_mycompany.pub | pbcopy

Configuring ssh

Configure ssh host names to use for work and personal. The config file is in ~/.ssh/config or you can create one if needed: touch ~/.ssh/config

The first host is the personal account and the second entry is for the work account. You can name the Hostname whatever you like. Host github.com Hostname github.com User git IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa Host github-mycompany Hostname github.com User git IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_mycompany

Configuring git repo

In the respective git repos, configure the your email address.

git config user.email "me@mycompany.com"

Testing it out

To test that the keys were added ok, you can run the following ssh commands.

ssh -T git@github.com
Hi bciuca! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

ssh -T git@github-mycompany
Hi bciuca-mycompany! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.