Using multiple SSH keys.

Vivek Kumar Bansal

January 04, 2016

1 min read

There might be situations where one might want to use different SSH keys for different sites. And here’s how to do it.

SSH keys

I’m assuming that we have already generated different SSH keys for github.com and bitbucket.org in ~/.ssh/.

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ ls
id_rsa  id_rsa.pub  github_rsa  github_rsa.pub bitbucket_rsa  bitbucket_rsa.pub

Now create a config file in ~/.ssh.

$ cd ~/.ssh
$ touch config

And add the following lines to the file using your favorite editor.

host github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_rsa
host bitbucket.org
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bitbucket_rsa

Reload the SSH service (depends on your system) and your are all set.

I hope you find this tip useful. Let me know using comments down below or tweet me @_vkbansal.