Using Git via SSH and a non-standard user

Use case: You currenty use GitHub or another git service via ssh, and have a defualt user configured in your ~/.gitconfig and uses your ~/.ssh/id_rsa key for connecting. So far so good.

Now, you want to use a separate user for certain repositories, for some reason. Here it is an explanation on how to do this.

First, add something like this to ~/.ssh/config:

Host github-otheruser
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa-otheruser
    User git
    HostName github.com
    Port 22

The, just clone the repository and configure user in one command:

git clone github-otheruser:otheruser/myrepo \
     --config=user.name='Other User' [email protected]

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