1.1 Creating keys

Start first on one of your machine (e.g. work) and create a SSH key for your gitWork account. Open your terminal and type

$ ssh-keygen -t RSA -b 4096 -C "work machine email@linked2your.gitWorkaccount"

What does this all mean exactly?

• The ssh-keygen command will create a private and public key.
• With the -t flag you specify that the key type should be RSA (there are different types such as RSA1, DS, etc. but RSA (actually it is RSA2) is supposed to be one of the safer ones.
• With the -b flag you specify the bit size (4096bits) of the key. The default is 2048bit but it is recommended to increase the size.
• The -C flag allows you to set comments in the key, which will help you later identify to which account, user or machine this key belongs. You can put whatever you want in this one string, but I find it useful to say which machine has the private key and the email address that links to that GitHub account.

Next you will be asked for the directory and filename. If you want to use the same key for all your accounts then go ahead and use the suggested id_rsa name by just pressing ENTER. But if you want to use different keys for your different accounts (as I did) then use a different name that will be easy to link to the specific account, e.g. gitWork-rsa. Save this file as suggested in the (hidden) .ssh folder of your home directory (on a Mac the home directory is /Users/UsernameOfComputer, on a Linux it would be /home/UsernameOfComputer).

You will be then asked for a passphrase, which adds more security in case your work machine gets stolen. So for my work machine I added a passphrase, but on my home machine later I left it blank and just pressed ENTER.

If you go now into your .ssh folder you will see two new files named gitWork-rsa and gitWork-rsa.pub:

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ls
config          id_rsa
gitWork-rsa     id_rsa.pub
gitWork-rsa.pub known_hosts

The first is your private key, meant to stay on your computer and never be shared! The second is the public key, which will be passed to your GitHub account and can be looked at by others.

Let’s create the second key for your other account right after:

$ ssh-keygen -t RSA -b 4096 -C "work machine email@linked2your.gitPersonalaccount"

Save it as e.g. ~/.ssh/gitPersonal-rsa and add a passphrase if this is your work machine.

If you used a passphrase it is advisable to add the keys to your SSH agent so you don’t need to remember your passphrases and type them frequently.

Start the SSH agent

$ eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

and add both keys

$ ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/gitWork-rsa
$ ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/gitPersonal-rsa

NOTE: The -K option is Apple’s standard version of ssh-add, which stores the passphrase in your keychain for you when you add an SSH key to the ssh-agent.

1.2 Adding the keys to your GitHub accounts

To add the public keys to your accounts, log first into your gitWork account.

• Go to Settings
• Click the tab that says SSH and GPG keys
• Click on Add new SSH and type in the ‘Name’ field something like “work machine” so that you can identify to which private key this public key belongs to.
• In the field ‘Key’ you should paste the content of the gitWork-rsa.pub. So how do you do that? Either open the file with your preferred editor (I like to use Atom), mark all the text and press cmd+C or in the terminal use the pbcopy command, which copies the content of a file into the clipboard:

$ pbcopy < ~/.ssh/gitWork-rsa.pub

• Now go back to your GitHub account and insert the copied text into the ‘Key’ field (with cmd+V). The public key starts always with ssh, followed by random letters and numbers. At the last line you should see the comment you added when creating the key.
• Click Add key, then enter your GitHub password to confirm.

1.3 Add accounts to your SSH config file

To be able to automatically log into your accounts you need to add the login details to the SSH configuration file, which is located in the .ssh folder.

If you don’t have any config file there yet, create one by typing

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ touch config

Open the config file with your preferred editor or in the terminal using e.g. the nano editor

$ nano config

Add the following details (it doesn’t matter where exactly you place it) :

# work account
Host gitWork
    Hostname github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitWork-rsa
    
# personal account
Host gitPersonal
  Hostname github.com
  User git
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitPersonal-rsa

The # indicates a comment so you can type there whatever you need that helps you later. The host alias can have any name but should have a clear link to the account (here, I simply used the account names as the host alias).

You can test if GitHub recognizes your keys by typing ssh -T and your host alias:

$ ssh -T gitWork

If all went fine you should see something like

Hi gitWork! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Test also your other account:

$ ssh -T gitPersonal

Pushing and pulling directly from RStudio

If the new repository represents an RStudio project you will notice that under Project options > ‘Git/SVN’ > Origin there will be the correct repo name (i.e., git@gitWork:gitWork/test-work.git), but the ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’ buttons in the Git Panel are greyed out. If you want to push and pull directly from within RStudio you need to tweak some of the git settings before you can do so.

Close RStudio and open the terminal. Change the directory to the repo folder and push again but this time using the -u flag:

$ cd ~/documents/test-work
$ git push -u origin master

When you open RStudio again you should see the ‘Push’ and ‘Pull’ buttons being activated! From now on you can push and pull from the terminal or from RStudio directly (at least for this repo).

Setting your Git username for EVERY repository on your computer

If you want to set a global Git username type this in the terminal

$ git config --global user.name "your name"

and check if your name was saved correctly

$ git config --global user.name
> your name

Setting your Git username for SINGLE repositories

If you want to set the username for a single repository, type instead - this time from within the respective repository:

$ cd ~/path/to/your/repo
$ git config user.name "your name"

Note that we exclude here the --global flag.

Check again with

$ git config user.name
> your name

If you are unsure what username has been set, and want to check, simply supply the above without final argument

$ git config user.name

ONE LAST NOTE HERE:

It is essential that if you clone a repository so that it is on two different computers, always use the pull command before you start working. Otherwise, you will put one of your repositories out of sync with the ‘master’ branch and you will need to use the ‘merge’ command, which can be tedious.