Managing Two Git Profiles on the Same Machine

Working with two Git profiles on the same machine might sound straightforward, but it can quickly turn into a frustrating experience. I faced this challenge when trying to maintain separate mac os profiles for personal and work projects. Here’s why maintining in the same profile was necessary for me and how I managed to resolve the issues.

The Pain of getting the permissions mixed between Profiles

As a developer juggling personal side projects and professional work, I found myself constantly switching between the tow user profiles. This led to several issue of Mixed Permissions I used to work on the different profile for work and personal projects, and used to struggle resetting permissions for brew, node and other binaries. These challenges forced me to find a better solution to manage multiple Git profiles on my machine.

Setting Up Two Git Profiles

To solve this, I set up separate SSH keys and configurations for each profile. Here’s how you can do it too:

1. Create SSH Keys for Each Account

Generate separate SSH keys for your personal and work accounts and add them to respective github accounts:

For macOS and Linux:

cd ~/.ssh
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email_for_personal_account@example.com" -f "github-personal"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email_for_work_account@example.com" -f "github-work"

2. Add SSH Keys to the SSH Agent

Add the generated keys to your SSH agent:

For macOS:

ssh-add --apple-use-keychain ~/.ssh/github-personal
ssh-add --apple-use-keychain ~/.ssh/github-work

Fir Linux:

ssh-add ~/.ssh/github-personal
ssh-add ~/.ssh/github-work

3. Configure SSH for Multiple Accounts

Edit the SSH config file to define host aliases for each account:
nano ~/.ssh/config

# Personal account
Host github-personal
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github-personal

# Work account
Host github-work
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github-work

4. Use Correct Accounts for Repositories

When cloning repositories, use the appropriate host alias:

• For personal projects:
  git clone git@github-personal:username/repo.git

• For work projects:
  git clone git@github-work:username/repo.git

If you’ve struggled with managing multiple Git accounts on the same machine, I hope this guide helps you as much as it helped me.

Edit : In case you're a gh cli user, I recommend you to add this interceptor to your shell config as more often than not this will bug you when you push after cloning fromt he gh cli way.

# Intercept gh repo clone command
function gh() {
  if [[ "$1" == "repo" && "$2" == "clone" ]]; then
    echo "⚠️  Please use SSH clone instead of gh repo clone"
    echo "ℹ️  Example: git clone git@github.com:owner/repo.git"
    return 1
  fi
  command gh "$@"
}