External authentication providers were enabled in netlify-cms version 0.4.3. Check your web console to see your netlify-cms version.

netlify-cms has its own github OAuth client. This implementation was created by reverse engineering the results of that client, so it's not necessary to reimplement client part of netlify-cms.

Github, Github Enterprise and Gitlab are currently supported, but as this is a general Oauth client, feel free to submit a PR to add other git hosting providers.

Other implementations in:

• Node - which was the main inspiration for this
• PHP that did not work for me...
• Go lang.

Install Repo Locally

git clone https://github.com/mcdeck/netlify-cms-oauth-provider-php
cd netlify-cms-oauth-provider-php
composer install

Create Oauth App Information is available on the Github Developer Documentation or Gitlab Docs. Fill out the fields however you like, except for authorization callback URL. This is where Github or Gitlab will send your callback after a user has authenticated, and should be https://your.server.com/callback for use with this repo.

Configuration is done with environment variables, which can be supplied as command line arguments, added in your app hosting interface, or loaded from a .env (symfony env files) file.

Example .env.local file:

# Default values for GitHub - leave as they are
# OAUTH_PROVIDER=github
# SCOPES=api,user,repo
# overwrite for GitHub Enterprise
# OAUTH_DOMAIN=https://github.com
OAUTH_CLIENT_ID=11111111111111
OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRET=22222222222222222222222222222222222
REDIRECT_URI=https://auth.example.com/callback/
ORIGIN=example.com

For Gitlab you also have to provide this environment variables:

# You can customize this to your URL for self-hosted GitLab instances
OAUTH_DOMAIN=https://gitlab.com
OAUTH_PROVIDER=gitlab
SCOPES=api

Client ID & Client Secret: After registering your Oauth app, you will be able to get your client id and client secret on the next page.

Redirect URL (optional in github, mandatory in gitlab): Include this if you need your callback to be different from what is supplied in your Oauth app configuration.

Git Hostname (Default github.com): This is only necessary for use with Github Enterprise or Gitlab.

You also need to add base_url to the backend section of your netlify-cms's config file. base_url is the live URL of this repo with no trailing slashes.

backend:
  name: [github | gitlab]
  repo: user/repo   # Path to your Github/Gitlab repository
  branch: master    # Branch to update
  base_url: https://auth.example.com # Path to ext auth provider

Create an .env.local file next to .env and set CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET and REDIRECT_URL as per the example above.

Upload to everyhting and point your webserver to public folder, or chose whatever method you normally chose to deploy Symfony apps.