How gh manage multiple ssh accounts?

[yesidrs]

I have two GitHub accounts, one for work and one for personal use. Normally, in my .ssh/config, I create two hosts, each linked to its respective SSH key.

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

Host github.com-me
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/personal_key

When using gh auth login and attempting to change the hostname with -h github.com-work, it fails. However, if I proceed in normal mode to login, I encounter a "Permissions Denied" error, which is expected since I need to pass the suffix.

What solution is there?

[williammartin]

Hi @yesiddev, I don't understand the exact situation you are facing sorry. I'd need to see the exact commands you are running with gh and git to get the full picture.

I think normally you are trying to use two different accounts on github.com and authenticate with git via SSH keys, and then you are setting up your .ssh/config so that when you add remote like git@github.com-work/cli/cli it uses your work key. However, I'm not sure how you are expecting gh to fit into your workflows.

What would you like to be happening?

[yesidrs]

Hi @williammartin, I am using gh auth login, I follow all the steps, and finally I am logged in, but when I try to clone a repo using gh repo clone <repo> I have the error Permisions Denied

here is the picture:

But if I use the normal git command git clone git@github.com-me:<repo> I don't have that issue. So the question is how gh manage these cases?

[williammartin]

Well, when you do git clone git@github.com-me:<repo> presumably git is looking at your .ssh/config, finds:

Host github.com-me
  HostName github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/personal_key

And uses ~/.ssh/personal_key to authenticate.

When you do gh repo clone it's trying to clone git@github.com:<repo> which will not find the correct key.

If your question is "how does gh work with .ssh/config entries to use different keys for different repos on github.com" the answer is that it doesn't support it.

If your question is "how does gh support using multiple accounts on github.com" then https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/4b077daf7e74dbe6bf933f69e220066e3a12e8b4/docs/multiple-accounts.md is currently the best thing to read, but you can't use ssh keys for this.

The -h flag for gh auth login is used to point to different API hosts, such as GitHub Enterprise Server installations.

[yesidrs]

That was what I wanted to corroborate, thank you very much for your time and responses, unfortunately, gh does not satisfy my needs for now, I work principally with Neovim, so my terminal it's my best friend when I work haha. But, yeah, I really need to use different ssh keys.

[yesidrs]

The only solution I found is change the Host for my personal key, removing the suffix -me

So I can use gh normally my personal account with ssh, but if a want to switch the host to use gh with ssh in my both accounts I must create a bash script to replace that host in my .ssh/config when I will make a gh auth switch

[williammartin]

No problem, I appreciate the feedback, it's useful for prioritisation. The multiple account support that is currently released is a thin slice of behaviour for us to build upon; namely, changing the active token used for API requests, and optionally as the git authentication method for users who use https rather than ssh.

It's definitely on our radar to better support multiple accounts that use ssh keys, as we know there are a lot of users that prefer this mode of authentication.

If you could wave a magic wand, how would you like gh to behave if we added support for multiple accounts using ssh auth?