If you sometimes work on both personal and professional projects that are hosted on GitHub, chances are that you’d like to separate identities. Maybe you have several accounts, maybe it’s just a matter of making the commits use different emails.

In this post, we’ll see how to manage such separate identities, at the SSH level and the Git level.

Configuring Per-Repository Author Information in Git

The idea is to organize cloned repositories in a hierarchy of folders, which will automatically get the correct configuration thanks to the Conditional Includes feature from Git 2.13.

Thanks to that feature, one can alter the configuration depending to a pattern, e.g. on the absolute path of a given repo. That can be put to use to alter the authorship information for instance.

Define such a pattern inside the .gitconfig file in your home folder:

[user]
    name = Bruce Wayne
    email = <bruce.wayne@wayneindustries.com>

[includeIf "gitdir:~/BatCave/"]
    path = .gitconfig-secret

Then define the overriding configuration of the .gitconfig-secret:

[user]
    name = Batman
    email = <caped.crusader@justiceleague.com>

Now, every time you clone a Git repository under the BatCave base folder, Git will use your secret batman identity for your commits 😎 👍

Configuring Different GitHub Accounts Via SSH Host Configuration

The next step is when you have different GitHub accounts (e.g. your work requires you to have a dedicated account, and you have personal pet projects that you manage using a different account).

Chances are, you’d like to authenticate to these separate accounts using SSH. For this, you need a little bit of setup, both for SSH and Git.

We’ll assume that you have generated two SSH keys: work and personal, linked to the adequate GitHub accounts.

First let’s setup SSH with Host configuration. In your ~/.ssh/ folder, create a config file (if it doesn’t already exists).

In there, put domain-specific configurations like these two:

#work SSH identity (default)
Host github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github

#personal SSH identity
Host batman.github.com
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_githubbatman

Let’s dive into a bit more details on the second configuration:

1. The Host batman.github.com is the key: SSH will recognize this “virtual” domain, e.g. in a git remote URL, and associate this configuration to it…
2. …but it will call the actual github.com domain, as configured by the HostName entry.
3. The user is still traditionally git in SSH git remotes
4. The IdentityFile is the SSH key to use.

Next you still need to tell git to use that SSH identity. For this, you need to edit your git SSH remote(s) in order to replace the github.com domain in the URL with batman.github.com:

git remote set-url origin git@batman.github.com:batman/batcave-OS.git

Think of it as a kind of DNS for Git 😄