What is gam?

GAM, short for Git Account Manager, is a command line tool for developers who need to work with more than one GitHub account, for example a personal account and a separate work account, from the same computer. Instead of juggling personal access tokens or SSH keys, GAM handles authentication for you using GitHub's own browser-based OAuth login flow, and it comes with a built-in OAuth client so there is no setup required before you can start using it. To get going, you install the tool globally through npm, then run a command to add each GitHub account you want to manage. Adding an account opens your browser to GitHub's device login page, and once you approve it there, GAM asks you to pick a short local nickname for that account, like work or personal, separate from your actual GitHub username. Tokens are stored securely in your operating system's keychain rather than as plain text files. Once you have added your accounts, you can switch between them with a single command, and GAM automatically updates your global Git username and email to match. It also registers itself as a Git credential helper, so when you run git push or git pull, the currently active account's credentials are used automatically without you having to log in again or juggle multiple SSH keys. Other commands let you list all configured accounts and see which one is active, check the current account's status and confirm your Git configuration matches it, remove an account and its stored token, and run a built-in health check called doctor that verifies Git is installed, accounts are configured correctly, tokens exist with the right permissions, and the credential helper is properly registered, offering a fix suggestion for anything that fails. Under the hood, the code is organized into clearly separated layers: thin command handlers, a services layer holding the actual business logic with no direct file or network access, a module for talking to GitHub's API and OAuth device flow, and a module for running Git commands, plus a storage layer for saving configuration and tokens. It requires Node.js 18 or later, Git, and on Linux, the libsecret library for keychain support. Accounts set up before this alias feature existed are automatically upgraded the first time they are read, without changing any stored data.