Set up 2 ssh keys for 2 github accounts

Except, sometimes you might work with two or more accounts other than one for accessing to Github or Gitlab and similar tools. For example you can have one account for your works at your company and one for the projects at school. To accomplish this, you will need to create multiple SSH key for each account.

With the problem being, in this tutorial you will learn how to configure and manage different accounts & keys for Github authentication.

First if you are new to Github or SSH keys, you can generate a new SSH key by openup your terminal and type:

The -t is for type of encryption, here we use rsa encryption. -C is for comment, we use this to differentiate with the other key that we are going to create afterward.

Leave a blank to save the newly generated key in /.ssh/id_rsa

To check your generated key use:

All ssh file on the system

There you go, the new SSH key has been created

Next, add public SSH key to your github account, go to https://github.com/settings/keys

Here, click on New SSH key

To see your public key use:

Your added SSH key should look something like this

Continue, we add new SSH key to the SSH agent

Success:

Now you can try to add a new repository

Go to your terminal

Now for the second SSH key, generate another key:

This time, we don’t want to leave a blank or typing random thing in there, otherwise it would orverwrite the id_rsa file that we have generated earlier

Instead, we include the path to the new file, like:

Carry on the next steps on creating new SSH key:

Use $ ls -al ~/.ssh you can see the key we have just created:

Continue to add the id_rsa_personal to your other github account

And add the new to ssh agent:

Next go to your /.ssh folder, and create config file, just a file named config with no file type:

We will need this config file to separate the two keys, open config file in text editor and add:

In this config file we separate two blocks for two account, Host github.com and Host github-personal-account , you can name them however you prefer, and these are how you can identify where you going to add git remote origin in the future.

Saved them. Now go to the second git account and create a new repo, do the same steps as the first repo, but for the remote origin we don’t want add:

Replace [email protected] with git@github-personal-account:

After adding remote origin, we can use git config --list to see current remote origin for the new folder

Then you should be able to push to the second account.

And there you go, we have finish setup two identical SSH keys for two distinctive Github accounts, you can further extend to add more key pairs following this tutorial as your need.