Comments with Giscus

Add fast, privacy-friendly comments to your site using GitHub Discussions.

January 3, 2026 • Jake Turner

Giscus is a lightweight, open-source comment system powered by GitHub Discussions. If your site is hosted on GitHub Pages, this is a very clean and easy comment solution.

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What you need

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Enable GitHub Discussions

1. Open your repository on GitHub
2. Go to Settings → General
3. Scroll to Features
4. Enable Discussions

Once enabled, GitHub will create a Discussions tab.

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Install the Giscus GitHub app

Giscus needs permission to create and manage discussion threads.

1. Visit
   https://github.com/apps/giscus
2. Click Install
3. Choose Only select repositories
4. Select your site repository
5. Confirm installation

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Create a discussion category

Inside your repository:

1. Go to Discussions
2. Click Categories
3. Create a new category:
   • Name: Comments
   • Type: General
   • Description: Page comments generated by Giscus

This category will store all comment threads created by your site.

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Generate your Giscus configuration

Go to the official setup page:

https://giscus.app

Fill out the form:

• Repository
  yourname/yourrepo

• Page ↔ Discussion mapping
  Discussion title contains page pathname

• Discussion category
  Comments

• Features

  • Reactions: optional
  • Emit metadata: disabled (recommended)

Once filled out, the page will generate a <script> tag.

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Copy values into _config.yml

Instead of pasting the script directly into your layout, this theme pulls all Giscus configuration from _config.yml.

Add (or update) this section:

# -------------------------------------------------
# Comments (giscus)
# -------------------------------------------------
giscus:
  enabled: true

  # From giscus.app → Repository
  repo: "YOURNAME/YOUR-REPO"

  # From generated script → data-repo-id
  repo_id: "REPO_ID_FROM_GISCUS_APP"

  # From giscus.app → Discussion category
  category: "Comments"

  # From generated script → data-category-id
  category_id: "CATEGORY_ID_FROM_GISCUS_APP"

  # Page ↔ Discussion mapping
  mapping: "og:title"

  # Optional UI behavior
  reactions_enabled: "1"
  emit_metadata: "0"
  input_position: "bottom"

  lang: "en"

Enable comments per post

Comments are opt-in.

Add this to any post/page front matter:

comments: true

The theme automatically renders Giscus at the bottom of the page when this flag is present.