How to manage multiple ssh keys in the ~/.ssh directory
bitbucket, git, github, ssh
Solution
You can have them anywhere you want, but their permission and the permission of the parent folders need to be strict:
- no writable access for the parent folder (for others and all)
- 644 for a public key
- 600 for a private key.
You then:
- declare those different keys in `~/.ssh/config` (example here)
- change the remote url in order to use the appropriate entry of the `~/.ssh/config` file which described the right ssh key to use.
That means an entry like:
Host mygithub
User git
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/mypath/mykey # wherever your "new" key lives
IdentitiesOnly yes
Allows you to replace an url like git@github.com:username/repo with:
git remote set-url origin mygithub:username/repo
Problem
I'm sure we all get this error from time to time: ``` $ git push origin master Permission denied (publickey). fatal: Could not read from remote repository. Please make sure you have the correct access rights and the repository exists. ``` The typical remedy is to simply create a public/private key pair and share it with your git host (in my case bitbucket, with their instructions) The thing is though, I have many accounts that require that I have a public/private key pair (for example i need to save a key to connect to AWS.. etc).. so what I do is that i create these keys and save them in separate directories ie ``` ~/.ssh $ find . ./awskeys ./awskeys/id_rsa ./awskeys/id_rsa.pub ./bitbucket ./bitbucket/id_rsa ./bitbucket/id_rsa.pub ``` but then this error pops up every now and then.. to solve it I have to move the relevant keys back to the root ~/.ssh. this doesn't seem right to me. How can I reliably do this?