Git with Multiple SSH Accounts Without Conflicts

Working with a personal and corporate account on the same machine should not be a lottery. With a simple SSH hosting strategy, it becomes predictable.

Guided practical case

Problem: accidental push to corporate repo with personal identity (or vice versa), poorly signed commits and PR blocked by policy.

Objective: separate identity, key and remote by context.

Base configuration

At ~/.ssh/config:

Host github-personal
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_personal

Host github-work
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_work

And on remotes:

git remote set-url origin git@github-work:org/repo.git

Rules per repository

In each repo it defines explicit identity:

git config user.name "Francisco Gonzalez"
git config user.email "[email protected]"

Don’t rely on --global for mixed environments.

Verification in TypeScript (pre-push)

You can use a hook script to validate email domain before push:

import { execSync } from "node:child_process";

const email = execSync("git config user.email").toString().trim();
const remote = execSync("git remote get-url origin").toString().trim();

const isWorkRepo = remote.includes("org/");
if (isWorkRepo && !email.endsWith("@company.com")) {
  throw new Error(`Email ${email} no permitido para remote ${remote}`);
}

console.log("Identity check OK");

Good practices

• use commit signing by context,
• validate identity before push,
• document flow for the team.
• automate identity checks in hooks.

• /blog/11-how-to-setup-multiple-git-accounts-with-ssh/
• /blog/13-syncing-and-signing-commits-for-different-remotes-and-different-git-accounts-using-hooks-from-a-single-local-repository/
• /blog/category/git/