[whalesalad]

yes. ssh keys can be named whatever and you can have as many of them in your .ssh dir (or any dir) as you want. "id_ed25519.pub" is just a default/convention.

run "ssh -vvv" and you will see how ssh client decides to look thru that directory. it will try all of them if none are specified.

[nerdjon]

My question was more the git command in the article I was curious about, I have never used that command myself and I was not sure if there was a weird limitation (possibly related to the git context) that it only worked with files within the git repo.

I am just trying to figure out how we are jumping from storing in ~/.ssh to storing in the repo here.

[danillonunes]

Yes, you can run in your local git repo:

  git config core.sshCommand "ssh -i /home/your_user/.ssh/your_custom_key"

(I believe replacing "/home/your_user" with "~" works too)

I use this all the time as my main key is ed25519 but some old repositories only support rsa keys.

The sshCommand config is, as the name says, the literal ssh command that is used by git when operations that call a remote with ssh (usually push/pull). You can also put other ssh options in there if you need.

Another option to achieve the same effect is to setup directly in your ~/.ssh/config:

  Host your_custom_alias
    HostName git.domain.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/your_custom_key

then instead of "git clone [e-mail]:repo.git" you clone it with "git clone your_custom_alias:repo.git" (or you change the remote if is already cloned). In this case you don't need to have to change the git sshCommand option.