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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T11:54:10+00:00

I’m having some trouble getting two different SSH keys/GitHub accounts to play well together.

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I’m having some trouble getting two different SSH keys/GitHub accounts to play well together. I have the following setup:

Repos accessible from one account using git@github.com:accountname

Repos accessible from another account using git@github.com:anotheraccount

Each account has its own SSH key. Both SSH keys have been added and I have created a config file. I don’t believe the config file is correct though. I’m not quite sure how to specify that repos accessed using git@github.com:accountname should use id_rsa and git@github.com:anotheraccount should use id_rsa_anotheraccount.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Andy Lester’s response is accurate but I found an important extra step I needed to make to get this to work. In trying to get two profiles set up, one for personal and one for work, my ~/.ssh/config was roughly as follows:

    Host me.github.com
    HostName github.com
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/me_rsa

Host work.github.com
    HostName github.com
    PreferredAuthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/work_rsa

    My work profile didn’t take until I did a ssh-add ~/.ssh/work_rsa. After that connections to github used the correct profile. Previously they defaulted to the first public key.

    For Could not open a connection to your authentication agent when using ssh-add,
    check:
    https://stackoverflow.com/a/17695338/1760313

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