Adding SSH Keys for Multiple Accounts in Git

Let's say you have multiple github accounts. One for your personal projects, one for your company that you work at, and one other remote repository account (let's say gitlab).

You are juggling with multiple accounts, you should not waste much time and pick a SSH from those remote repository and pull it in your local machine, that makes the process just smooth and saves a ton of time.

Create a SSH Key

To create a SSH key, in linux you can use ssh-keygen command.

        
bash
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "alice@example.com"

The above command will prompt you for two things

1. The location where you want to store the key
2. The passphrase for accessing the key

Add SSH Key to Github

Locate to the ssh folder and copy the generated .pub file to your github account.

For example, if you have created the key at ~/.ssh/your_name then copy the contents of the file ~/.ssh/your_name.pub to your clipbaord.

Navigate to your github account and in the settings, SSH and GPG keys tab, click on Add SSH key and copy the contents of your clipboard to the Key field.

Configuring the SSH keys for multiple accounts

        
config
Host your_company
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/your_company

Host your_name
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/your_name

Host some_name
  HostName gitlab.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/some_name

You can change the Host config tag values in the ~/.ssh/conFig

The next time you clone/create a repository on those remote git providers, you need to specify the ssh key for that account.

For example, if you have a repository github.com/StartUp_company/some_wired_project then you can specify the remote as git@your_company.com:StartUp_company/some_wired_project. Here, the git@your_company is the Host value tag from the ~/.ssh/config. If that repository is from your your_company organisation/user scope, you need to add the git@your_company tag, if that's your project, simply add git@your_name before the repository url i.e. your_name/repo_name which would set the origin as git@your_name:your_name/repo_name, here the 1st your_name is the tag from the Host config and the 2nd your_name is the github username.

So, in summary if you wanted to use multiple accounts in the same machine, you can understand in the following example:

        
bash
ssh -T git@your_name

git clone https://github.com/your_name/repo_name

However, you will need to authenticate with the ssh keys in this way everytime you push/pull a repository. So for that, you can set the origin with the git@your_name tag as the host for automatically authenticating the ssh keys on every push/pull or other activities.

Thanks for reading, Happy Coding :)

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