Backend-less operation: letting the user enter username and token and talk to API with them

[vadimkantorov]

Does Decap-CMS support working without any backend / netlify account?

E.g. one can let the user enter github username / personal token, and work directly with the GitHub API for storing and retrieving contents (which works really nice for GitHub Pages/Actions-based websites). I tried this as a proof-of-concept with my own mini-CMS https://vadimkantorov.github.io/moncms/ . It works, so I'm looking for a more fully-fledged CMS following the same authn concept.

Thanks!

[martinjagodic]

tldr: No. This is answered here: #663. The issue is quite old, so maybe a new solution has emerged since then. Let us know your conclusion if you decide to dig in.

If you want to do this without Netlify, you can use one of third-party OAuth providers: https://decapcms.org/docs/external-oauth-clients/

[vadimkantorov]

Yes, completely backend-less OAuth with GitHub is impossible (I wonder if it's possible to do it with a Cloudflare Worker), but for some cases letting the user paste their repo-specific (it is not supported to create a token only for write-access to a specific repo) github access token is fine: e.g. for editing a small personal website or just with a handful of editors. This mode allows to go completely backend-less, and use GitHub API for CRUD operations, and this is what I implemented in https://vadimkantorov.github.io/moncms, it works. This mode even allows operation from file:/// protocol

I think there is a lot of value of having complete backend-less as a working option - especially for mini-sites / personal blogs, students and so forth, as it reduces the number of moving pieces and dependencies/configuration on additional services (like netlify)