Multiple github accounts on the same computer?

Question

Trying to work on my both my actual \"work\" repos, and my personal repos on git hub, from my computer.

The work account was set up first, and everything works flawl

Answer 1

This answer is for beginners (none-git gurus). I recently had this problem and maybe its just me but most of the answers seemed to require rather advance understanding of git. After reading several stack overflow answers including this thread, here are the steps I needed to take in order to easily switch between GitHub accounts (e.g. assume two GitHub accounts, github.com/personal and gitHub.com/work):

1. Check for existing ssh keys: Open Terminal and run this command to see/list existing ssh keys ls -al ~/.ssh
   files with extension .pub are your ssh keys so you should have two for the personal and work accounts. If there is only one or none, its time to generate other wise skip this.
   
   - Generating ssh key: login to github (either the personal or work acc.), navigate to Settings and copy the associated email.
   now go back to Terminal and run ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "the copied email", you'll see:
   
   Generating public/private rsa key pair.
   Enter file in which to save the key (/.../.ssh/id_rsa):
   
   id_rsa is the default name for the soon to be generated ssh key so copy the path and rename the default, e.g. /.../.ssh/id_rsa_work if generating for work account. provide a password or just enter to ignore and, you'll read something like The key's randomart image is: and the image. done.
   Repeat this step once more for your second github account. Make sure you use the right email address and a different ssh key name (e.g. id_rsa_personal) to avoid overwriting.
   At this stage, you should see two ssh keys when running ls -al ~/.ssh again.
2. Associate ssh key with gitHub account: Next step is to copy one of the ssh keys, run this but replacing your own ssh key name: pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa_work.pub, replace id_rsa_work.pub with what you called yours.
   Now that our ssh key is copied to clipboard, go back to github account [Make sure you're logged in to work account if the ssh key you copied is id_rsa_work] and navigate to
   Settings - SSH and GPG Keys and click on New SSH key button (not New GPG key btw :D)
   give some title for this key, paste the key and click on Add SSH key. You've now either successfully added the ssh key or noticed it has been there all along which is fine (or you got an error because you selected New GPG key instead of New SSH key :D).
3. Associate ssh key with gitHub account: Repeat the above step for your second account.

4. Edit the global git configuration: Last step is to make sure the global configuration file is aware of all github accounts (so to say).
   Run git config --global --edit to edit this global file, if this opens vim and you don't know how to use it, press i to enter Insert mode, edit the file as below, and press esc followed by :wq to exit insert mode:

   [inside this square brackets give a name to the followed acc.] name = github_username email = github_emailaddress [any other name] name = github_username email = github_email [credential] helper = osxkeychain useHttpPath = true

Done!, now when trying to push or pull from a repo, you'll be asked which GitHub account should be linked with this repo and its asked only once, the local configuration will remember this link and not the global configuration so you can work on different repos that are linked with different accounts without having to edit global configuration each time.