Setting up comments using Giscus

Have a challenge with any of this? Let us know and we’ll help!

The “minimal mistakes” theme that this ships with allows for a number of different comment set ups. But out of the box, we wanted to enable a quick path comments for your sites.

Giscus allows you to use the GitHub Discussions feature, which comes built into GitHub for your repository, to host comments on your blog. To set up Giscus comments:

• Enable discussions for your repository. If you don’t see the “Discussions” tab, you can go to the settings for your repository, and under the Features section, check the Discussions box.
• On the discussions tab, click the pencil icon next to Categories, and create a new category called “Blog Comments” or similar. Make sure you set the discussion format to Announcement, because you only want the Giscus app (which we’ll set up shortly) to be the one managing comments.
• Navigate to the Giscus app and follow the instructions to set it up.
  • As part of the instructions, you’ll have to add the Giscus app to your repository. This will show a warning, but is perfectly fine for use and you can feel comfortable accepting it.
  • For the repository name, you’ll use your username and the repository name, e.g. excellalabs/blog-in-a-box for this one.
  • You’ll copy the ID, category ID, etc. from the Giscus app – rather than copying the <script> tag that it supplies, you’ll copy the informational bits into the giscus configuration in your docs/_config.yml file.