How to use multiple github accounts on Mac

we may need multiple github accounts in our daily work, so I want to introduce a easy way to config multiple accounts on our Mac machine.

Create SSH keys for all accounts

First make sure your current directory is your .ssh folder.

cd ~/.ssh

Syntax for generating unique ssh key for ann account is:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your-email-address" -f "github-username"

here

-C: stands for comment to help identify your ssh key

-f: stands for the file name where your ssh key get saved

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "hippiezhou@gmail.com" -f "github-work"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "hippiezhou@outlook.com" -f "github-personal"

Add SSH public key to the Github

Copy the public key

vim ~/.ssh/github-work.pub
vim ~/.ssh/github-personal.pub

Paste the public key on Github

• Sign in to Github Account
• Goto Settings > SSH and GPG keys > New SSH Key
• Paste your copied public key and give it a Title of your choice.

Add SSH keys to SSH Agent

add some alias in ~/.zshrc file

alias ssh-personal="ssh-add -D && ssh-add ~/.ssh/github-personal && git config --global user.name 'happy life' && git config --global user.email 'hippiezhou@outlook.com'"
alias ssh-work="ssh-add -D && ssh-add ~/.ssh/github-work && git config --global user.name 'happy work' && git config --global user.email 'hippiezhou@gmail.com'"

Then you can use a CLI alias to switch to the account that you want.

# switch to personl account
ssh-personal
# switch to work account
ssh-work

More info: ssh-agent