How to integrate Giscus to your Astro Blog

Giscus is an open-source blog comment service, powered by GitHub Discussions. It’s very similar to Disqus but they don’t use trackers :)

It took me 10-15 minutes to get it up and running on my blog.

Installation

Follow the steps here: https://giscus.app
Once you have installed the GitHub App fine-tune the config;
At the end, you should have some code with some data-xxx attributes.
Create a Comments.atro component and copy-paste the code in it:

<section class="mx-auto mt-12">
  <script
    is:inline
    src="https://giscus.app/client.js"
    data-repo="maxpou/maxpou.fr"
    data-repo-id="[YOUR-REPO-ID]"
    data-category="General"
    data-category-id="[YOUR-CATEGORY-ID]"
    data-mapping="og:title"
    data-strict="0"
    data-reactions-enabled="1"
    data-emit-metadata="0"
    data-input-position="bottom"
    data-theme="preferred_color_scheme"
    data-lang="en"
    data-loading="lazy"
    crossorigin="anonymous"
    async
  ></script>
</section>

5. Call the component in your blog post container:

---
import Comments from '../components/Comments.astro'
// ...
---

<BlogPost {...post}>
  <Content />
  <AboutAuthor />
  <Comments/>
</BlogPost>

Enjoy 🥳

Dark Mode

If you have a dark mode button, you have to write some JS to update the theme according to the current mode.

I use Tailwind’s dark mode class strategy. Meaning, that when I switch the dark mode “ON”, my HTML page has a dark CSS class (<html class="dark">).

The trick here is to listen to observe the document CSS classes and trigger a updateGiscusTheme() method to update the theme.

My code looks like the following:

<section class="mx-auto mt-12">
  <!-- ... -->
</section>

<script is:inline>
  function updateGiscusTheme() {
    const theme = document.documentElement.classList.contains('dark') ? 'dark' : 'light'
    const iframe = document.querySelector('iframe.giscus-frame')
    if (!iframe) return
    iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ giscus: { setConfig: { theme } } }, 'https://giscus.app')
  }

  const observer = new MutationObserver(updateGiscusTheme)
  observer.observe(document.documentElement, { attributes: true, attributeFilter: ['class'] })

  window.onload = () => {
    updateGiscusTheme()
  }
</script>

⚠️ Heads-up!

Don’t forget to add the is:inline next to the script tag!

Custom styles

Let’s say you want to extend the dark style.

If you want to extend a style, copy/paste the desired styles from the repository to public/giscus/dark.css. Then you can update the data-theme attribute and put the URL pointing to your CSS file (i.e. data-theme={${Astro.url.origin}/giscus/dark.css}).

Notes: If you have a dark mode toggle, you can do something like this:

iframe.contentWindow.postMessage(
  {
    giscus: {
      setConfig: { theme: `${new URL(document.URL).origin}/giscus/dark.css` },
    },
  },
  'https://giscus.app',
)

About the author

Hey, I'm Maxence Poutord, a passionate software engineer. In my day-to-day job, I'm working as a senior front-end engineer at Orderfox. When I'm not working, you can find me travelling the world or cooking.

Follow @_maxpou