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If like myself, you find yourself using different accounts across multiple platforms (GitHub for work/personal, Codeberg, etc.), you need to manage multiple Git identities on one machine.

Here I documented my setup, mostly to have a quick reference I can pull up to share with friends or if I need to set up another machine.

Setup

General setup: main .gitconfig is just includes based on different folders:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/work/"]
    path = "~/Projects/work/.gitconfig-work"
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/personal/"]
    path = "~/Projects/work/.gitconfig-personal"

Inside each gitconfig, I define basic identity stuff and a few defaults:

[user]
    email = <REDACTED>
    name = Darius
    signingkey = <REDACTED> # GPG signing key id
[push]
    default = current
[alias]
    tree = log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
[core]
    editor = code
    sshCommand = "ssh -i ~/.ssh/dit-gh/some_ssh_key"
[commit]
    gpgsign = true
[init]
    defaultBranch = main

Extra: Adding a GPG key & using it on GitHub/GitLab

To generate a new GPG key:

gpg --full-generate-key

Fill out all the info, add a password and it's ready to export and use for signing commits. Make sure the email matches one of the verified emails on your GitHub/GitLab/etc. account if you want to have verified commits on that site.

To export the key, first grab the long form of the GPG key id:

gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long

For the relevant key, it should be the string that comes after ed25519/... or 4096R/... etc.

Then you can use the ID to export the public key:

gpg --armor --export SOMEGPGKEYID

The output can be pasted somewhere in your account settings, and you're ready to go.

Extra: Managing SSH keys

To manage SSH keys, you can define multiple hosts in your .ssh/config file:

# work account
Host github.com-work
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/work-gh/id_ed25519

# personal account
Host github.com-personal
    HostName github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/personal-gh/id_ed25519

Host codeberg.org
    HostName codeberg.org
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/codeberg_key

If you have multiple accounts on GitHub (same HostName), make sure to give unique names for the Host (e.g. github.com-work).

When cloning repos, make sure to then use SSH and specify the different host (so instead of just github.com, you need to use github.com-personal when cloning).

Better cloning for same host

Since the above mentioned unique hostname can be quite of a hassle sometimes, I have created a zsh function and added it to my .zshrc:

pclone() {
    git clone git@github.com-personal:"$@".git
}

Like that, I can just use pclone username/somerepo.git and know for sure that the correct SSH key will be used.