An NPM package to allow you to use netlify-cms with GitHub authentication when deploying on Vercel.

1. Install the module

# cd into/your/vercel/project
npm install @openlab/vercel-netlify-cms-github

2. Create the auth route

Create a vercel endpoint at api/auth.ts

export { auth as default } from '@openlab/vercel-netlify-cms-github'

3. Create the callback route

Create a vercel endpoint at api/callback.ts

export { callback as default } from '@openlab/vercel-netlify-cms-github'

4. Update your config.yml

Update your config.yml to include this backend

backend:
  name: github
  repo: YOUR_GITHUB_REPO
  base_url: YOUR_WEBSITE
  auth_endpoint: api/auth

• repo should be your GitHub repo path, like owner/repo
• base_url should be the full url to the root of your site, like https://example.com/
• auth_endpoint needs to be set to link it up correctly, you can't put it in base_url

(optional) Configure vercel.json

If you have your admin files in a folder (e.g. admin/index.html and admin/config.yml) you might want to force vercel to use trailing slashes. This is because if you visit /admin netlify will look for a config at /config.yml, not in the admin folder.

To solve this add (or update) your vercel.json in the project root:

{
  "trailingSlash": true
}

5. Commit these endpoints to git

git add api/auth.ts api/callback.ts
git commit -m ":star: add GitHub auth routes and connect to netlify-cms"

6. Create a GitHub OAuth application

Go to https://github.com/settings/developers.

• Set Homepage URL to your site's homepage
• Set Authorization callback URL to `https://YOUR_SITE_HERE/api/callback
• Make a note of your client_id and client_secret

7. Setup Vercel environment variables

Go to your vercel dashboard, https://vercel.com.

• Navigate to your project then Settings > Environment Variables
• Add OAUTH_CLIENT_ID and set the value from the GitHub OAuth application
• Add OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET and set the value from the GitHub OAuth application
• You can store them however you like but secrets should be the most secure
• Make sure your environment variables are exposed on the deployment(s) you need

Done

🎉 Your site should now be linked up!

Environment Variables

In addition to OAUTH_CLIENT_ID and OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET, this package also exposes these variables to configure the GitHub authentication. These all have default values configured to talk to github.com.

• OAUTH_HOST (default: https://github.com) The GitHub server to talk to
• OAUTH_TOKEN_PATH (default: /login/oauth/access_token) The path of the GitHub OAuth token endpoint
• OAUTH_AUTHORIZE_PATH (default: /login/oauth/authorize) The path of the GitHub OAuth Authorization endpoint

Other than the Vercel endpoints, these are exported:

• oauthConfig is an object with configuration for simple-oauth2
• randomState is a function to generate a random state for an OAuth2 flow
• renderResponse is a function to generate HTML with client-side JavaScript to complete the OAuth2 flow using window.opener.postMessage

These were primarily exposed for digitalinteraction/netlify-cms-github-auth to use.

This project was set up by puggle