GitHub Metadata

Authentication

For some fields, like cname, you need to authenticate yourself. Luckily it’s pretty easy. First, you need to generate a personal access token (an oauth token will work too but it’s good to have a token for each purpose so you can revoke them later without breaking everything):

To generate a new personal access token on GitHub.com:

• Open https://github.com/settings/tokens/new
• Select the scope public_repository, and add a description.
• Confirm and save the settings. Copy the token you see on the page.

Once you have your token, you have three ways to pass it to this program:

1. JEKYLL_GITHUB_TOKEN

These tokens are easy to use and delete so if you move around from machine-to-machine, we’d recommend this route. Set JEKYLL_GITHUB_TOKEN to your access token (with public_repo scope for public repositories or repo scope for private repositories) when you run jekyll, like this:

$ JEKYLL_GITHUB_TOKEN=123abc [bundle exec] jekyll serve

2. ~/.netrc

If you prefer to use the good ol’ ~/.netrc file, just make sure the netrc gem is bundled and run jekyll like normal. So if I were to add it, I’d add gem 'netrc' to my Gemfile, run bundle install, then run bundle exec jekyll build. The machine directive should be api.github.com.

machine api.github.com
    login github-username
    password 123abc-your-token

3. Octokit

We use Octokit to make the appropriate API responses to fetch the metadata. You may set OCTOKIT_ACCESS_TOKEN and it will be used to access GitHub’s API.

$ OCTOKIT_ACCESS_TOKEN=123abc [bundle exec] jekyll serve

DotEnv

Rather than prefixing your shell commands with the environmental variables all the time, you can use the Dotenv gem. Simply install it by adding it to your Gemfile, then create a .env file and populate it with your JEKYLL_GITHUB_TOKEN or OCTOKIT_ACCESS_TOKEN. Be sure you do not commit your .env file!

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