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Multiple Git Accounts

This project does not validate Git identity during install.

This guide is for Git identity routing (name, email, signing). For SSH transport and key selection, see ssh-keys.md.

Use this with:

  • README.md for the default first-time setup order
  • ssh-keys.md if you need multiple SSH keys and host aliases

If you only use one Git identity on a machine, keep it simple:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

You can verify the active values with:

git config --global --get user.name
git config --global --get user.email

If you also use one GitHub account with one SSH key, you usually do not need the multi-account pattern below.

If you use personal and work accounts on the same machine, the recommended approach is to keep Git account routing in your dotfiles repo and keep machine-specific values in ignored local files.

A practical multi-account pattern is:

  1. Keep a shared base Git config in your dotfiles repo.
  2. Use includeIf rules to select identity files by repository path.
  3. Store the real user.name, user.email, and signing preferences in ignored local files such as personal.local, work.local, or school.local.
  4. Adjust the gitdir: paths to match the directories you actually use on your machine.

Example routing config:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Code/github.com/your-user/"]
  path = ~/.config/git/personal.local

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Code/github.com/your-company/"]
  path = ~/.config/git/work.local

Example local identity file:

[user]
  name = Your Name
  email = [email protected]

Example repository layout and behavior:

~/Code/github.com/your-user/personal-site
~/Code/github.com/your-user/macOS-dotfiles
~/Code/github.com/your-company/internal-api
~/Code/github.com/your-company/platform-web

With the includeIf rules above:

  • repos under ~/Code/github.com/your-user/ use ~/.config/git/personal.local
  • repos under ~/Code/github.com/your-company/ use ~/.config/git/work.local

Example checks inside each repository:

cd ~/Code/github.com/your-user/personal-site
git config --get user.email
# [email protected]

cd ~/Code/github.com/your-company/internal-api
git config --get user.email
# [email protected]

If you also use SSH host aliases, the matching remotes might look like:

git -C ~/Code/github.com/your-user/personal-site remote get-url origin
# git@github-personal:your-user/personal-site.git

git -C ~/Code/github.com/your-company/internal-api remote get-url origin
# git@github-work:your-company/internal-api.git

Useful checks:

git config --show-origin --get user.name
git config --show-origin --get user.email
git config --list --show-origin