I have the following use case: I would like to be able to push to [email protected]:gitolite-admin using the private key of user gitolite-admin, while I want to push to [email protected]:some_repo using 'my own' private key. AFAIK, I can't solve this using ~/.ssh/config, because the user name and server name are identical in both cases. As I mostly use my own private key, I have that defined in ~/.ssh/config for [email protected]. Does anyone know of a way to override the key that is used for a single git invocation?
(Aside: gitolite distinguishes who is doing the pushing based on the key, so it's not a problem, in terms of access, ownership and auditing, that the [email protected] string is identical for different users.)
Even if the user and host are the same, they can still be distinguished in ~/.ssh/config. For example, if your configuration looks like this:
Host gitolite-as-alice
HostName git.company.com
User git
IdentityFile /home/whoever/.ssh/id_rsa.alice
IdentitiesOnly yes
Host gitolite-as-bob
HostName git.company.com
User git
IdentityFile /home/whoever/.ssh/id_dsa.bob
IdentitiesOnly yes
Then you just use gitolite-as-alice and gitolite-as-bob instead of the hostname in your URL:
git remote add alice [email protected]:whatever.git
git remote add bob [email protected]:whatever.git
You want to include the option IdentitiesOnly yes to prevent the use of default ids. Otherwise, if you also have id files matching the default names, they will get tried first because unlike other config options (which abide by "first in wins") the IdentityFile option appends to the list of identities to try. See: https://serverfault.com/questions/450796/how-could-i-stop-ssh-offering-a-wrong-key/450807#450807