GitHub: Separate credentials for two accounts on Windows

Question

I recently created a second GitHub account two separate my work and my private projects (before, I only had the work account). I use https in combination with the Windows credential storage. To automatically select the correct account, I store my private account info in ~/.gitconfig and the work account info in ~/work/.gitconfig as suggested here.

Unfortunately, when I try to push changes in my private repositories, I get the following error:

$ git push
remote: Permission to privateuser/privaterepo.git denied to workuser.
fatal: unable to access 'https://[email protected]/privateuser/privaterepo.git/': The requested URL returned error: 403

I set the remote URL to git remote set-url origin https://[email protected]/privateuser/privaterepo.git like suggested here. Pushing in my work repos still works fine. And when I type git config user.name in my private/work repos, I get my private/work username, respectively - as it should be.

What's the problem with the new private repositories? Why does git still think I'm workuser, when I try to push to my private repos? Does it have to do something with the Windows Credential storage, which I used to store my work credentials? It never asked for the password of my private account...

Answer 1

The conditional include that I detail here is only for commit authorship (user.name/email).

This has nothing to do with authentication (credentials: username/password)

Those are probably cached in a credential manager (like the linux osx-keychain)
Check the output of:

git config credential.helper

If you can, use instead SSH keys per environment, as I illustrate there: then you can easily maintain different identities for the same remote repo (github.com)

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Note: the GCM (Git Credential Manager) installed alongside Git for Windows does not, as stated in issue 363, support multiple users per Uri.

Answer 2

I just setup a mutli-credential setup for my Jenkins that might be applicable to what you're doing.

For our Jenkins user, we're pushing our configuration to AWS CodeCommit to backup the server. We also need the ability to use the mvn release plugin which requires the ability to push to our Github repo. Our jenkins instance is also in a subnet that prevents outgoing SSH so we have to use HTTPS.

Thus, we need two sets credentials. It should also be noted that our Github organizaiton requires MFA so the password is actually the personal access token.

# /var/lib/jenkins/.gitconfig
[user]
  name = Jenkins
  email = [email protected]
[credential]
  helper = !aws --profile default codecommit credential-helper $@
  UseHttpPath = true
[credential "https://github.com"]
  helper = store

# /var/lib/jenkins/.git-credentials
https://username:[email protected]/SomeOrg/some-repo

One additional point is that since it seems both your repos/organizations are on Github, here are some additional points from the git documentation that might be applicable to you:

useHttpPath - By default, Git does not consider the "path" component of an http URL to be worth matching via external helpers. This means that a credential stored for https://example.com/foo.git will also be used for https://example.com/bar.git. If you do want to distinguish these cases, set this option to true.

https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials