How to use multiple GitHub account using GitHub CLI

Frequent use of multiple GitHub accounts, whether for work and personal projects, can often become a cumbersome process. The need to switch accounts and re-login each time can be quite inconvenient. In this blog post, I’ll unveil a straightforward hack to streamline this process, making managing multiple GitHub accounts a more user-friendly experience.

The login

Now a days, the GitHub CLI has become a go to tool while working with git and GitHub. After we login using the gh auth login command, we get a config.yml and a hosts.yml file under the ~/.config/gh directory (for Linux). Inspecting the hosts.yml file, we would see something like below:

github.com:
    user: USER_NAME
    oauth_token: AUTH_TOKEN
    git_protocol: https

Each time, you login with a different account, you would see user and oauth_token has changed.

Making it convenient

We would make use of the gh aliases for making things easier using the following steps:

1. Create host files

We would at first create different host YAML files for each GitHub account we are going to use, such as hosts.yml.work for work account, hosts.yml.personal for personal account etc.

To populate the files, we would use the identical structure as hosts.yml. The value of user would be the username of your GitHub account. To get the oauth_token go to your GitHub profile > settings > Developer settings > Personal access tokens > Tokens (classic). Now generate a new token (classic) with appropriate scopes (e.g., gist, read:org, repo, workflow). Copy the newly generated token and use it as the OAuth token. After populating, a file would look something like the below:

github.com:
    user: shahad-mahmud
    oauth_token: gho_************************************
    git_protocol: https

2. Setting up aliases

If you look at the config.yml file, you will find a aliases attribute. If unmodified, it would look something like:

aliases:
    co: pr checkout

Here we will create new aliases for each of our account. To do that, we will follow the following snippet:

ALIAS_NAME:'!cp PATH/TO/A/HOST/FILE ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml && gh auth status'

After creating the aliases for work and personal accounts, the aliases attribute will look like something below:

aliases:
    co: pr checkout
    personal: '!cp ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml.personal ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml && gh auth status'
    work: '!cp ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml.work ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml && gh auth status'

3. Switch between accounts

At this step, the work is almost done. To verify the aliases are setup, run the gh alias list command. It will list all available aliases including the newly created ones.

Now switch between accounts using the gh ALIAS_NAME command. A successful operation would look something like below:

$ gh personal        

# github.com
#   ✓ Logged in to github.com as shahad-mahmud (/home/shahad/.config/gh/hosts.yml)
#   ✓ Git operations for github.com configured to use https protocol.
#   ✓ Token: gho_************************************
#   ✓ Token scopes: gist, read:org, repo, workflow

Thats all for this blog post. In case of any suggestions or improvements, reach me out.