GitHub

For repositories stored on GitHub, the github backend allows CMS users to log in directly with their GitHub account. Note that all users must have push access to your content repository for this to work.

Because GitHub requires a server for authentication, Netlify facilitates basic GitHub authentication.

To enable basic GitHub authentication:

1. Follow the authentication provider setup steps in the Netlify docs.
2. Add the following lines to your Decap CMS config.yml file:

backend:
  name: github
  repo: owner-name/repo-name # Path to your GitHub repository
  # optional, defaults to master
  # branch: main

Specifying a status for deploy previews

The GitHub backend supports deploy preview links. Decap CMS checks the context of a commit's statuses and infers one that seems to represent a deploy preview. If you need to customize this behavior, you can specify which context to look for using preview_context:

backend:
  name: github
  repo: my/repo
  preview_context: my-provider/deployment

The above configuration would look for the status who's "context" is "my-provider/deployment".

Git Large File Storage (LFS)

Please note that the GitHub backend does not support git-lfs, see this issue for more information.

GraphQL API

Note: not compatible with git-gateway

GraphQL allows to retrieve data using less individual API requests compared to a REST API. GitHub's GraphQL API still does not support all mutations necessary to completely replace their REST API, so this feature only calls the new GraphQL API where possible.

You can use the GraphQL API for the GitHub backend by setting backend.use_graphql to true in your CMS config:

backend:
  name: github
  repo: owner/repo # replace this with your repo info
  use_graphql: true

Learn more about the benefits of GraphQL in the GraphQL docs.