Using different SSH identity files depending on Github projects

If you are in a situation like mine, you have personal projects on Github, but you are also part of corporate team which has private repositories, and they require you to go through single sign-on.

Authenticating to a GitHub organization with SAML single sign-on - GitHub Help

When you go through SAML SSO, you basically need to give the SSH key you are using SSO capabilities.

Authorizing an SSH key for use with a SAML single sign-on organization - GitHub Help

You could do this with the SSH key that you are already using for your personal projects, which is totally fine, but I really would like to keep my work and non-work credentials separate.

I mean, I really don’t want to screw up, so I’d like to play it safe.

So then I basically have to differentiate between these two:

git clone git@github.com:work-project/work-repository.git
git clone git@github.com:lestrrat/personal-repository.git

and provide separate identities depending on the path.

Initially I thought that this would be simple enough using .ssh/config and/or .git/config but it turned out harder than I thought.

After a few attempts, I came up with this: Use smartcd (or its alternatives like direnv) in the non-default project, which in my case is work-project, and just specify this environment variable.

GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/your_work_identify_file"

And that’s it! These tools automatically sets up different environments depending on the directory that are currently working on, and in git’s case it works out perfectly.

I use pecoto switch directories, and it works like a charm.