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 "[email protected]" -f "github-personal"
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]" -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.gitFor 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.