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Multiple GitHub SSH locally

I started remotely working in 2019. I have two GitHub accounts: one for my personal projects and one for my work projects. I need to switch between the two accounts frequently.

Here is the steps I followed to set up multiple GitHub accounts on one computer:

Set up SSH keys​

I need to have two SSH keys: one for my personal account and one for my work account. I followed the steps below to generate the two SSH keys. See Set up SSH for GitHub for more details.

Once getting two ssh keys (~/.ssh/id_rsa & ~/.ssh/id_rsa_personal), and following the steps in Set up SSH for GitHub to upload the public keys to each Github account respectively. Then we need to set up the SSH config file:

  1. Create a new file named config in the ~/.ssh directory

  2. Add the following content to the config file:

~/.ssh/config
Host github.com-work
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Host github.com-personal
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_personal
  1. Save the file

Ready to go

Clone the repository using SSH with personal account​

git clone [email protected]:<github-account>/<repo-name>.git

Clone the repository using SSH with work account​

git clone [email protected]:<github-account>/<repo-name>.git

Make sure that the remote URL is correct​

git remote -v

It should show the following output for personal account:

[email protected]:<github-account>/<repo-name>.git

It should show the following output for work account:

[email protected]:<github-account>/<repo-name>.git