Git Identity Crisis: Automating Multi-Account GitHub Like a Sane Person

Stop manually switching between your work and personal GitHub accounts like it's 2015

3-min read
I have two GitHub accounts. One for work, one for personal projects. If you’re reading this, you probably do too. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve been committing from the wrong email at least once a month, silently polluting your contribution graph with phantom identities

The problem is deceptively simple: when I git push for any of my various open source projects, I would like it routed through my personal account.

And when I push from work, it should use my work email. No manual switching. No “oh crap, wrong email” moments at 2am.

Here’s the setup I landed on. It took a couple minutes and I haven’t thought about it since.

Note: If you’re an SSH person, you can solve this with separate keys and ~/.ssh/config Host aliases but I use HTTPS across machines and prefer leaning on gh’s token management rather than juggling key pairs

The Commit Identity Problem

Git uses a global user.name and user.email from ~/.gitconfig for every commit. If your global config is your work email, every commit across every repo — including your weekend passion project — gets stamped with you@acme.com.

You could set a per-repo override with git config user.email in each project dir, but that’s fragile. You’ll forget (read: I have). You’ll clone a new repo and push three commits before realizing you’ve been committing as the wrong person.

The Fix: includeIf with Remote URL Matching

Git v2.36 introduced hasconfig:remote,¹ which lets you conditionally include config files based on the remote URL. This is the key.

First, create a separate config file for your personal identity:

  # ~/.gitconfig-personal
  [user]
      name = Your Name
      email = you@gmail.com

Then add conditional includes to your ~/.gitconfig:

  [user]
      name = Your Name
      email = you@work.com
  [includeIf “hasconfig:remote.*.url:https://github.com/YourPersonalUsername/**”]
      path = ~/.gitconfig-personal
  [includeIf “hasconfig:remote.*.url:git@github.com:YourPersonalUsername/**”]
      path = ~/.gitconfig-personal

That’s it. Any repo with a remote pointing to your personal GitHub org automatically uses the personal identity. HTTPS and SSH both covered. No per-repo config, no directory-based hacks.

The Push / Pull Auth Problem

Solving the commit identity is only half the battle. When you git push, git also needs to authenticate with GitHub. If you use gh (the GitHub CLI), it has its own auth — and it only has one “active” account at a time.

The naive approach: gh auth switch before every push. The correct approach: a custom credential helper that routes automatically.

The Fix: A Custom Credential Helper

Git’s credential system supports custom helpers — scripts that receive the target host and repo path, and return the appropriate credentials. We can write one that checks the repo owner in the URL and picks the right `gh` token:

  #!/bin/bash

  # ~/.local/bin/gh-credential-switcher
  if [ “$1” != “get” ]; then
    exit 0
  fi

  host=”“
  path=”“

  while IFS=’=’ read -r key value; do
    [ -z “$key” ] && break
    case “$key” in host) host=”$value” ;; path) path=”$value” ;;
    esac
  done

  if [[ “$host” != “github.com” ]]; then
    exit 0
  fi

  if [[ “$path” == YourPersonalUsername/* ]]; then
    user=”YourPersonalUsername”
  else
    user=”your-work-username”
  fi

  token=$(gh auth token --user “$user” 2>/dev/null)
  if [ -n “$token” ]; then
    echo “protocol=https”
    echo “host=github.com”
    echo “username=$user”
    echo “password=$token”
  fi

Make it executable chmod +x) and wire it into your ~/.gitconfig:

  [credential “https://github.com”]
      helper =
      helper = !/path/to/gh-credential-switcher
      useHttpPath = true

The empty helper = line clears any previously registered credential helpers (looking at you, macOS Keychain). And useHttpPath = true is critical — without it, git only sends the host to credential helpers, not the repo path, and the script can’t distinguish between orgs.

The macOS Gotcha

If you’re on a Mac, Xcode ships a system-level gitconfig at /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/share/git-core/gitconfig that registers osxkeychain as a credential helper. This runs before your custom helper and returns whatever cached credential it has — defeating the entire setup.

The helper = line in [credential “https://github.com”] clears this. If it doesn’t stick (system-level configs can be stubborn), you can also add a global [credential] block:

  [credential]
      helper =
      helper = !/path/to/gh-credential-switcher

Prerequisites

Both GitHub accounts need to be logged into gh:

  gh auth login  # login with your work account
  gh auth login  # login with your personal account

You can verify both are available with

gh auth status

The “active” account doesn’t matter anymore — the credential helper bypasses it entirely.

Verification

Quick sanity check across repos:

# Personal repo
$ git -C ~/projects/side-project config user.email
you@gmail.com

$ git -C ~/projects/side-project ls-remote --heads origin
a1b2c3d  refs/heads/main

# Work repo

$ git -C ~/projects/work-thing config user.email
you@work.com

$ git -C ~/projects/work-thing ls-remote --heads origin
d4e5f6a  refs/heads/main

Different identities, different auth tokens, zero manual switching.

TL;DR

1. Layer

   1. Mechanism

   2. Config

---

1. Commit identity

   1. includeIf hasconfig:remote

   2. ~/.gitconfig + ~/.gitconfig-personal

2. Push / pull auth

   1. Custom credential helper

   2. ~/.local/bin/gh-credential-switcher

3. macOS Keychain bypass

   1. helper = (clear line)

   2. ~/.gitconfig

4. Path-based routing

   1. useHttpPath = true

   2. ~/.gitconfig

Clone any repo and it just works. New personal project? Personal identity and auth. New work repo? Work credentials. The setup is entirely URL-based, so it doesn’t matter where on disk the repo lives or what branch you’re on.

Ten minutes of config. Months of not thinking about it.

1. Introduced in Git 2.36, see docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-hasconfigremoteurl