Using multiple git profiles on the same machine

Captured at: 2013-05-23 07:11:19 UTC

When using public key authentication to clone and use a git repository, one might want to use a different identity for certain repos, while leaving the default identity alone. One way to get around this on a Mac, which has worked quite well for me is to use the .ssh/config file to create individual profiles, and then to clone the repos using the appropriate configuration for each repo.

Update email id and possibly name for repo


ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "<email>" -f '$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa_personal'

The default identity was already stored under id_rsa.

Now edit ~/.ssh/config

Contents of .ssh/config


# Default account
Host github.com
        HostName github.com
        User git
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

# Personal account
Host github_personal
        HostName github.com
        User git
        IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_personal

Now when cloning your repo, use:

Modify githubuser and githubrepo for your use case


git clone git@github_personal:<githubuser>/<githubrepo>.git

This should clone the new repo. All subsequent git commands in this repo would point to your other identity (in my case my personal github identity).