MacOS Terminal: how to use a seccond ssh key?

Question

I'm working on MacOS and want an SSH/Git login with a seccond ssh-key.
I have two key pairs in ~/.ssh/

id_rsa
id_rsa.pub
id_rsa.gitlab
id_rsa.gitlab.pub

id_rsa and id_rsa.pub are the older key. This key is working fine. But where the second key is needed, i can't login. It trys the first key and fails.

Running this command ssh-add /Users/kevin/.ssh/id_rsa.gitlab helps. But after a reboot, it dosen't work anymore and i must run the command again.

Is there a better solution as run this command after each reboot?

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

The way to use several ssh keys is to use a ~/.ssh/config

Host serverKey1
   Hostname server1 # or ip address of server1
   User serverUser
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Host serverKey2
   Hostname server1 # or ip address of server1
   User serverUser
   IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa.gitlab

You then need to use an scp-syntax for your ssh url:

git clone serverKey1:/my/repo
git clone serverKey2:/my/repo

serverKey1 and serverKey2 are entries in your ~/.ssh/config file in order to pass to ssh the right server, user and identify file (public and private keys)

If those private keys are password-protected, you would still need to add them.

You can see more at this atlassian help page: "Configure multiple SSH identities for GitBash, Mac OSX, & Linux".

MacOS Terminal: how to use a seccond ssh key?

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