I'd like to be able to use different GitHub accounts for different repos on my computer.

But when I try cloning a private repo from the 2nd account, I get this error:

$ git clone git@githubpersonal:2nd-github-account-username/redacted.git
Cloning into 'redacted'...
ERROR: Repository not found.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

In ~/.ssh/config I have the SSH key for my second GitHub account set up, which is id_rsa_personal. id_rsa is the one the other GitHub account uses, and it works.

Host githubpersonal Hostname github.com User git IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_personal

What I've tried so far

At first I thought it might be an issue with the user.name and user.email in my ~/.gitconfig not matching the account. So I added

[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/"] path = ~/projects/.gitconfig

...and made a ~/projects/.gitconfig with the other name & email. That did not work.

Then I read that you need to be in an existing git repository for that includeIf to work, which doesn't make sense before you clone the repo, so I just switched my global gitconfig:

$ git config --global user.name "<2nd-github-account-username>"
$ git config --global user.email "<2nd-github-account-email>@gmail.com"

Still no luck. git config --get user.email and user.name show the expected values.

I'm not sure where else to look from here.

1 Answer

If the specified keypair is not being honored, try enabling the IdentitiesOnly option. The client might be using the wrong key from ssh-agent.

Test using ssh githubpersonal – make sure the server greets you with the expected GitHub account name.

The user.* settings are not used for authentication. The Git protocol has no authentication of its own, only the one provided by SSH (or HTTPS).