There are multiple ways to set up multiple GitHub accounts on one PC. For me, however, I prefer a solution that is more portable and requires less configuration. Thus, the solution I show here uses separate SSH keys for the two accounts, and the way you choose which account to use is by modifying the remote address of the GitHub repository. Only one small configuration file is required.
Prerequesites
Before you can begin, you’ll need to ensure you have Git and OpenSSH installed (Git typically comes with OpenSSH). You can download Git here.
After this, you’ll need to ensure you have ssh-agent properly configured and started. For Windows users, use the following two commands in an admin powershell to set ssh-agent to automatically start (and then manually start it for this session):
Get-Service ssh-agent | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic -PassThru | Start-Service
start-ssh-agent.cmd
Creating the SSH Keys
Create SSH keys via the following command:
ssh-keygen -t ed25519
When prompted for a file to save it to, I recommend saving it to a file called ~/.ssh/id_<your_github_username>, replacing <your_github_username> with your GitHub username. This is so it’s easy to tell what this SSH key is for at a later date. Make sure to generate two keys, one for each of your two GitHub accounts.
Adding the SSH Keys to GitHub
Head over to github.com/settings/keys and add your relevant public key to your account. You can get the contents of your public key by running:
cat ~/.ssh/id_<your_github_username>.pub
Adding Your SSH Keys to SSH-Agent
Run the following command for each of your two SSH keys to add them to the SSH-Agent:
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_<your_github_username>
Creating the SSH Config
Create the file ~/.ssh/config and put the following in it:
# github <account1>
Host <account1>.github.com
HostName github.com
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_<account1>
# github <account2>
Host <account2>.github.com
HostName github.com
PreferredAuthentications publickey
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_<account2>
NOTE: Replace <account1> and <account2> with your two GitHub account usernames.
Using Your Two Accounts
You’re now all set to use your two accounts on your PC! Now, any time you want to clone a GitHub repository from a specific account, make sure to use SSH, and make sure you use the proper url.
Normally, the url will look something like this: git@github.com:jere-mie/blog.git. You just need to change the github.com to whatever you put for the Host in your SSH config. So, it’ll look something like git@account1.github.com:jere-mie/blog.git.
Thus, to clone a repo at that address, you’d run:
git clone git@account1.github.com:jere-mie/blog.git
Credits
Thanks for the two following resources which helped me through this process: