Managing Multiple Github Profiles

Teachers
#1

Does anyone have advice, options, or best practices on managing multiple git profiles on one machine?

Thanks.

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#2

Hi

Do you mean multiple GitHub Accounts or multiple Git configurations?

#3

Both. I have multiple github accounts and I wanted to know if someone had an easier way to configure 1 laptop to push and pull from either when needed using ssh and the command line.

#4

Regarding the multiple GitHub accounts.

The TOS only allow 1 account per person.
GitHub Terms of Service - Account Terms

Regarding the configuration:
This depends on your use case.

Could you give me a bit more details?
How many accounts are involved?
Do you need to commit using different data (private email/business email)?

#5

Hi, I guess I’ve infringed the terms of service.

Can you direct me to how I can resolve this?

I have my personal GitHub account SchemaCzar.

For teaching at Boston University, I created BU-AWolfe. This is where some classes and organizations are for that job.

Since joining Loyola University of New Orleans, I created ADWolfe-LoyNO for work there.

I want to keep these activities separate. I thought separating the accounts would help me avoid conflicts of interest. But if that approach violates GitHub’s TOS, I’m happy to fix it.

Can you suggest a way to re-combine my split personality?

Thank you,

Andrew Wolfe

#6

@ADWolfe-LoyNO ,

While I appreciate the difficulty in maintaining separate accounts for business and pleasure, so to speak, @PReimers is correct that is is a ToS breach, not to mention making things unnecessarily difficult for you it seems! GitHub has this guide to help with merging multiple accounts. While there’s no “one-button” solution to this, it is relatively trivial to transfer repository ownership to a single account.

When it comes to keeping work and personal projects separate, I personally create all repositories created for university purposes under a university organization, with my personal account as a contributor. That way, ownership of the repository stays within a university entity, that I manage through my personal login.

Hope this helps! Let me know if anything is unclear or if I missed part of your question.

Chris

#7

The only concern I have is that there could be intellectual property issues. Your approach makes a lot of sense, so I guess I’ll start folding in my work to organizations. At that point my University GitHub-orgs might claim ownership of my work, but I know that one of them (and probably both) openly cede dominant rights to faculty like myself.

#8

I think I got all the info I needed. Thank you.

I was actually just trying to rig my machine to possibly toggle back and forth from business and pleasure profiles depending on what projects I was working on (2 separate email addresses: one education organization account for class and educational groups; 1 public personal profile I’ve had for years). I really only created the 2nd profile to get approved for educator use with my edu email address.

Merging my 2 accounts will definitely make things way easier (and legal) so I’m just going to do that (Thanks for the account merging guide @ccannon94).

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