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Paweł Dąbrowski
Paweł Dąbrowski

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Speed up development by adding bash aliases

Currently, I'm using two git accounts with separated keys, one for side projects and one for the company I'm working for. I have to switch to the second account each time I am using a new shell window and want to push changes using a different account:

eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/company

git push origin something

it is quite annoying. However, it can be easily replaced with a simple bash alias with a meaningful name that you would always remember.

Creating a bash alias

Mainly, there are two user-level files which system run when a bash shell starts - ~/.bash_profile and ~/.bashrc. You have to edit one of them to add our alias. The alias format is the following:

alias alias_name='command1;command2'

in my case I have to run two commands so the alias looks like this:

alias company_git='eval "$(ssh-agent -s)";ssh-add ~/.ssh/company'

Now I can simply type company_git in terminal each time I open a new shell window and I want to be ready to push some code to the company repositories. It's so simple but makes the development less frustrating.

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