Enabling Comments with in Jekyll using Giscus

I found this post per accident, apparently we can have comments in static blogs by levering GitHub discussions!

I host my blog on GitHub, which has a nice integration for building and testing using GitHub Actions. I don’t need to host anything, and it’s essentially free.

There’s disqus, a web service which solves the problem of hosting and managing comments for static web sites. I used disqus before, but since my relaunch I was not so sure about having a dependency do some external service.

Giscus uses GitHub’s Discussions – which can be enabled on any repository hosted on GitHub – to add comments on a static website. The Giscus bot automatically adds discussions for a reaction / comment entry.

The nice thing is that the chirpy theme I use already has a giscus integration!

Configuration

Configuration is simple – I found more explanation over at Martin’s Tech Journal. I had to:

1. Install and authorize the giscus app in GitHub blog’s repository
2. Configure the app on https://giscus.app a. Enter my blog’s repository b. Enabled the pathname mapping c. Use the “Announcements” Discussion Category d. Enable Reactions for the Main Post
3. Copying the values displayed in the script tag to the _config.yml
4. Enable giscus comments

comments:
  active: "giscus"
    enabled: true
    repo: "seletz/seletz.github.com"
    repo_id: "REDACTED"
    category: "Announcements"
    category_id: "REDACTED"
    mapping: "pathname"
    input_position: "bottom"
    lang: # optional, default to the value of `site.lang`
    reactions_enabled: "1"