Git – Working with Multiple GitHub Accounts

1. Context

Do you use two or more GitHub accounts – one for official use, another for personal use, and so on? Did you encounter issues like Git commands are using the wrong SSH key or the wrong GitHub user id or you can use repositories from one GitHub account but not from others? If yes, then read on.

In this article, we are assuming you have two GitHub accounts account1 and account2 setup using emails Ids [email protected] and [email protected] respectively.

2. Generate and Configure SSH Keys

For each of your GitHub accounts, generate SSH keys using the corresponding email Ids and add the public key to GitHub.

# Generate keys for the first account. Default file name is id_rsa, change it to github_account1_id_rsa
# It creates two files: ~/.ssh/github_account1_id_rsa and ~/.ssh/github_account1_id_rsa.pub
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"


# Generate keys for the second account. Default file name is id_rsa, change it to github_account2_id_rsa
# It creates two files: ~/.ssh/github_account2_id_rsa and ~/.ssh/github_account2_id_rsa.pub
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"

Copy the above generated public key (the content of .pub file) and add it to the corresponding GitHub account at Settings > SSH and GPG Keys > Add New in https://github.com/settings/ssh/new

3. Create Aliases and Configure

Create two different aliases of GitHub hosts with the appropriate identity file in ~/.ssh/config

# Alias for the first GitHub account
Host github.com-account1
   HostName github.com
   User git
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_account1_id_rsa
   IdentitiesOnly yes

# Alias for the second GitHub account
Host github.com-account2
   HostName github.com
   User git
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_account2_id_rsa
   IdentitiesOnly yes

Now, change the remote URL of the local Git repo in <repo_path>/.git/config

# In first repo from first account
[remote "origin"]
	url = [email protected]:userid1/repo1.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

# In second repo from second account
[remote "origin"]
	url = [email protected]:userid2/repo2.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

4. Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues, enable verbose mode to troubleshoot. All subsequent Git commands will produce SSH logs that will help you understand and fix the issue.

# Enable verbose in the repo
git config core.sshCommand "ssh -vvv"

# Disable verbose in the repo
git config core.sshCommand "ssh"

5. Conclusion

You are all set to use multiple GitHub accounts from your machine. This approach is applicable when you are using multiple accounts in GitLab, BitBucket, etc. as well.