managing-github-accounts

How to work with repos associated with different github accounts on one machine

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.

3. Head back over to the SSH config file at ~/.ssh and amend accordingly to:

#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 yes

Replace user1 or user2 with your GitHub usernames/identification-handlers

4. Create two separate folders for work and personal repos

We are going to create individual .gitconfig files in each of the work and personal folders so that way any repo in these folders will be associated with the correct username and email.

mkdir ~/personal/

mkdir ~/work/

When cloning repos do so in these two folders

5. Create a master .gitconfig

Git will automatically look in the ~/ folder for a .gitconfig file. The .gitconfig file we place in ~/ will act as a config selector to utilize the correct .gitconfig file based on what directory our repository is in. Create a .gitconfig file in the ~/ directory with the following contents:

# ~/.gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:~/personal/"]
path = ~/personal/.gitconfig

[includeIf "gitdir:~/work/"]
path = ~/work/.gitconfig

[core]
excludesfile = ~/.gitignore # valid everywhere

4. Create work and personal .gitconfig files

In both the work and personal folders create .gitconfig files with the following contents filling in the appriopriate user names and emails

[user]
    name = user1
    email = user1@gmail.com

5. Clone repos:

Be sure to use the correct format when cloning

git clone git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git

6. Ensure your remote url is in the right format e.g:

git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git

• You either run git remote set-url origin git@github.com-user1:user1/your-repo-name.git
• 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:

• Automatically use correct SSH key for remote Git repo
• StackOverFlow
• Connecting to GitHub with SSH

Special thanks to @pbuditi for your help!