Friday 27 April 2012

Using multiple keys for github

Recently, I was working from my office laptop. I had set up ssh keys for Github on that system. However, when I had to work from my personal system, I realized that I don't have those ssh keys with me on this system. Also, the ssh keys on the current system were used for another purpose. So, I decided to have multiple keys on Github as well as on my system. I created my new keys with the following command:

ssh-keygen -t <rsa/dsa as per your choice> -f <new private key file like ~/.ssh/id_dsa.github> -C "comment"

This created a new key pair for me. Now, I had to configure ssh to use this key for github. So, I added the following lines to ~/.ssh/config file.

Host github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa.github
User git


Now, I had to add this new key to my ssh keys on Github. I opened the new public key file (id_dsa.github.pub in the above case) and copied its contents to add a new key on Github. I tried ssh -vT git@github.com and verified that it was using the new key and I was able to access Github successfully.

OpenSSH_5.9p1, OpenSSL 1.0.0g 18 Jan 2012
debug1: Reading configuration data /home/me/.ssh/config
debug1: /home/me/.ssh/config line 9: Applying options for github.com
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: Connecting to github.com [207.97.227.239] port 22.
debug1: Connection established.
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_dsa.github type 1
debug1: identity file /home/me/.ssh/id_dsa.github-cert type -1

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