Per-repo GitHub accounts
I primarily use the GitHub Desktop app for my git needs. It’s a lot less cool than the git cli, and I am comfortable with it but if I’m being 100% serious with you I switched to the Desktop app because it makes it super easy to chunk your changes up into multiple commits in visual/interactive way that I never quite learned to do on the command line – and when you have a CTO who looks at how many commits each dev is doing “but it’s not a metric you are judged by wink” you don’t really have time to deal with accidentally messing up a rebase and bringing down CI for an afternoon.
Well, my work uses some kind of GitHub Enterprise setup I don’t understand and as it turns out, I also like doing a little code here on the side for fun so I find myself in a situation where I need to have two GitHub accounts all the time. The Desktop app does not support that, so I’d just sign in and out of the app depending on what code I needed to do. The app does a magic browser login link so as long as the browser is logged in to the correct account, it “just works”.
One day I decided that I have had enough and there must be a better way. ChatGPT provided instructions that were not only not helpful, but actively incorrect. Stack Overflow leads you to the gh cli or other weird things that also did not work with my setup. I think the problem is that I have literally two GitHub accounts that I need to use at the same time, most assume… something else.
Well, I figured it out and it’s not that complicated and I’m sure at least 2 Hacker News commenters will enjoy pointing out that this is so obvious it’s shocking I wasn’t born with this knowledge and should seriously look into a mental diagnosis.
Each account needs an SSH key:
$ ssh-keygen -f urmom
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in urmom
Your public key has been saved in urmom.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:tCZ+0HmuiN2d3SfGqwXFmKOzEJTFZbPaWs6EkDmjnZs [email protected]
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
| .+..+ |
| ..o.. * |
| O = o |
| = O = o |
| + S * = |
| . + * O . |
| . E + o.. |
| o + o o o+ .|
| . o o o ooo+ |
+----[SHA256]-----+
Use whatever filename makes sense to you, like personal or work.
Next copy your public key to GitHub. Add a new SSH key. Copy your public id to the clipboard. Change the key name to match yours, I just found this one laying around. pbcopy < ~/.ssh/urmom.pub
Add a new SSH key, give it a title, and paste the public key into the field.
If your GitHub account is enrolled in SSO, you’ll need to configure that on the SSH key. It should look like a “Configure SSO” dropdown with your org’s information somewhere to do your 2fa - but I’m not going to elaborate on that detail any further.
Now, clone the repo using ssh (not https!)
GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/urmom" git clone [email protected]:urmom/email-inbox.git
CD into the repo and tell git to always use the urmom key when sending emails to her inbox:
git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i ~/.ssh/urmom"
Any respectable git client will honor these settings without any additional configuration. I’ve tested this with both GitHub Desktop as well as Sublime Merge. Command-line git works great as well.
I feel actually a little silly blogging this but I have been signing in and out of GitHub.com like an animal and I’m sorry about that! I swear GitHub wants you to think you need their gh cli tool to do this as well - to be honest I have no idea what that tool is used for.