ssh on github and bitbucket using sourcetree

Question

I have created two ssh identietes and added it to my account when I do ssh-add -l I see two identities. I have a work account linked to one identity and a peresonal account linked to the other account. When i try to clone a repository on bitbucket I see an error that says "this is not a valid source path/URL" even though it exists. When I try to clone a repository on github I see a pop up message that says "gethub API call failed" and then provides me some kind of HTML dump of a website that looks like a 404 since the title is 404. I am wondering if this is a bug, or if I have somehow messed up my configuration. I followed the steps on the documentation and it seems to work. Thanks!

stevestreeting · Answer

Alternatively you can use one single BB account locally but assign permissions to that account to the repos owned by other accounts. You might want to try out the Organisations feature on BB to make that easier!

Aaron Drake · Answer

I would use one key but bitbucket does not let me enter in the same key for both accounts. It says the key is already in use. If this feature was added to bitbucket then that would be a nice fix.

I don't want to go into detailed ssh setup so I guess I will use one account on ssh and the other on https.

Thanks!

stevestreeting · Answer

Thanks for the detail. So I think the issue is that ssh is trying the first key only, and that's failing for the repositories that have to be accessed by the other key. Is there any reason you just don't use a single key?

If you need to use two keys, you're going to have to add some ssh rules to make this work. This could get quite fiddly because although it's pretty easy to specify which ssh key to use per host, if you use different keys on the same host for different paths, you start having to update the configuration for every repo you create / use. Therefore I really recommend that you use a single key instead.

If the reason for having 2 keys is that you don't want to have universal access to administer repos, then a simpler option might be to create another user on your mac for the admin operations, which has that admin key in its ssh configuration. Mac OS X Lion now has the ability to fast-switch between users without logging out the current user so it's actually pretty convenient to use this setup.

HTH