How To Connect To Two Github.com Repos Using Different SSH keys

Easily differentiate different workloads on same machine

Photo by Mohammad Rahmani on Unsplash

Often you have a use-case where you have 2 different Github.com user accounts, say one for personal projects and another for work.

From the same machine you would like to clone repositories belonging to the 2 different GitHub.com userids, and using 2 different SSH keys.

How do you achieve that?

We’ll use something called host aliases in SSH Config.

Step 1 — Generate SSH Keys

You first generate the SSH keys for the 1st user like so:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "user1@somedomain.com" -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_user1

Then you generate the SSH key for the 2nd user like so:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "user2@someotherdomain.com" -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_user2

Step 2 — Upload the private keys into GitHub

For each of the 2 accounts in GitHub.com, upload your individual Private SSH key in the account settings.

Step 3 — Configure your local SSH Config file