Recently, I had a need to have two Github accounts on the same computer and I wanted to use both of them without typing password everytime, when doing git push or pull. Let’s say that I have two accounts “superman” and “batman”. A solution is to use ssh keys and define host aliases in ssh config file (each alias for an account).

Solution

1.Edit or create ssh config file (~/.ssh/config):

# Default github account: superman
Host github.com
   HostName github.com
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/superman_private_key
   IdentitiesOnly yes

# Other github account: batman
Host github-batman
   HostName github.com
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/batman_private_key
   IdentitiesOnly yes

2.Add ssh private keys to your agent link

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/superman_private_key
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/batman_private_key

3.Test our connection

$ ssh -T [email protected]

$ ssh -T [email protected]
Warning: Permanently added the ECDSA host key for IP address '140.82.121.3' to the list of known hosts.
Hi superman! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

$ ssh -T git@github-batman

Warning: Permanently added the ECDSA host key for IP address '140.82.121.3' to the list of known hosts.
Hi batman! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

4.Cloning repository

Using superman account:

$ git clone [email protected]:superman-user/project.git /path/to/project

Using batman account:

$ git clone git@github-batman:batman-user/project-other.git /path/to/project-other

5.Using proper user and email

Assumption that for default account we are using global git configuration, so for not default Github account go to cloned repository and do the following:

$ cd /path/to/project-other
$ git config user.email "[email protected]"
$ git config user.name  "Batman"