If you also need to juggle between work accounts and your own personal Git you might get yourself dealing with customizing Git configuration for each individual repository.

In this article, I am going to share a directory structure suggestion that combined with conditional include will help you achieve a more efficient way that works on any Unix-like (Mac, Linux etc.) machine.

For the remainder of this article we are going to suppose you have two work accounts and a single personal account.

Keys, keys and more keys

Using SSH keys allows you to avoid typing username and password for Git operations greatly speeding things up.

In order to create one key for each of the accounts you are going to use the ssh-keygen command, make sure that when asked for a passphrase you leave it blank (just press Enter twice):

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "remi.byers@protonmail.com" -f "personal"
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "remi.b@work1.io" -f "work1"
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "r.byers@work2.com" -f "work2"

The username is intended to be fictional.

Once finished the result will be three pairs of keys (public and private) for each account, like so:

$ ls -la ~/.ssh
total 64
drwx------  10 remb  staff   320 Jul 30 11:02 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 31 remb  staff   992 Aug  5 16:01 ..
-rw-------   1 remb  staff   434 Jul 23 08:51 config
-rw-------   1 remb  staff  2602 Jul 22 13:43 personal
-rw-r--r--   1 remb  staff   567 Jul 22 13:43 personal.pub
-rw-------   1 remb  staff  2610 Jul 23 08:43 work1
-rw-r--r--   1 remb  staff   574 Jul 23 08:43 work1.pub
-rw-------   1 remb  staff  2610 Jul 22 13:44 work2
-rw-r--r--   1 remb  staff   574 Jul 22 13:44 work2.pub
-rw-r--r--   1 remb  staff  1718 Jul 31 15:20 known_hosts

The contents of each public key (the files ending with .pub) needs to be added on the corresponding Git account.

#git #github #keys