nuxt-i18n

nuxt-i18n

i18n for Nuxt

📖 Release Notes

Features

This module attempts to provide i18n features to Nuxt applications by installing and enabling vue-i18n as well as providing routing helpers to help you customize URLs for your languages.

Setup

• Add nuxt-i18n dependency using yarn or npm to your project

yarn add nuxt-i18n
# npm i nuxt-i18n -S

• Add nuxt-i18n to modules section of nuxt.config.js

{
  modules: [
    ['nuxt-i18n', { /* module options */ }],
 ]
}

Usage

Available languages

To configure your app's languages, use the locales option and the defaultLocale option if needed:

{
  modules: [
    ['nuxt-i18n', {
      locales: [
        {
          code: 'en',
          iso: 'en-US',
          name: 'English'
        },
        {
          code: 'fr',
          iso: 'fr-FR',
          name: 'Français'
        }
      ],
      defaultLocale: 'en',
      // ...
    }]
  ]
}

These locales are used to generate the app's routes, the code will be used as the URL prefix (except for the default locale).

locales and defaultLocale are both added to app.i18n which means you can refer to them in any component via the $i18n property:

<nuxt-link
  v-for="(locale, index) in $i18n.locales"
  v-if="locale.code !== $i18n.locale"
  :key="index"
  :exact="true"
  :to="switchLocalePath(locale.code)">{{ locale.name }}</nuxt-link>

Translations

Messages translation is achieved by vue-i18n which you can configure via the vueI18n option:

{
  modules: [
    ['nuxt-i18n', {
      vueI18n: {
        messages: {
          fr: {
            home: 'Accueil',
            about: 'À propos',
            category: 'Catégorie'
          },
          en: {
            home: 'Homepage',
            about: 'About us',
            category: 'Category'
          }
        },
        fallbackLocale: 'en'
      }
      // ...
    }]
  ]
}

Refer to vue-i18n's doc for more info.

Routing

nuxt-i18n overrides Nuxt default routes to add locale prefixes to every URL.

If you define a defaultLocale, the URL prefix is omitted for this language

Say your app supports English (as the default language) and French, and you have this files structure for your pages:

pages/
├── index.vue
├── about.vue

The resulting routes would look like this:

[
  {
    path: "/",
    component: _3237362a,
    name: "index-en"
  },
  {
    path: "/fr/",
    component: _3237362a,
    name: "index-fr"
  },
  {
    path: "/about",
    component: _71a6ebb4,
    name: "about-en"
  },
  {
    path: "/fr/about",
    component: _71a6ebb4,
    name: "about-fr"
  }
]

You can also customize the path for each route/language using the routes key in your configuration, this can be useful if you want to have different paths depending on the user's language (see configuration example below).

In the app, you'll need to preserve the language when generating URLs. To do this, nuxt-i18n registers a global mixin that provides some helper functions:

• localePath – Returns the localized URL for a given page. The first parameter can be either the name of the route or an object for more complex routes. A locale code can be passed as the second parameter to generate a link for a specific language:

<nuxt-link :to="localePath('index')">{{ $t('home') }}</nuxt-link>
<nuxt-link :to="localePath('index', 'en')">Homepage in English</nuxt-link>
<nuxt-link
  :to="localePath({ name: 'category-slug', params: { slug: category.slug } })">
  {{ category.title }}
</nuxt-link>

Note that localePath uses the route's base name to generate the localized URL. The base name corresponds to the names Nuxt generates when parsing your pages/ directory, more info in Nuxt's doc.

• switchLocalePath – Returns a link to the current page in another language:

<nuxt-link :to="switchLocalePath('en')">English</nuxt-link>
<nuxt-link :to="switchLocalePath('fr')">Français</nuxt-link>

You might want to add :exact=true to your <nuxt-link> to prevent the active-class from being added somewhere you did not expect

SEO

By default, nuxt-i18n adds some metadata to help with your pages SEO. This can be disabled by setting seo option to false. Here's what it does:

• Add a lang attribute containing the current locale's ISO code to the <html> tag.
• Generate <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x"> tags for every language configured in nuxt.config.js. For each language, the ISO code is used as hreflang attribute's value.

To customize SEO metadata for any page, simply declare your own head () method, have a look at lib/templates/i18n.seo.plugin.js if you want to copy some of nuxt-i18n's logic.

Lazy-load translations

To prevent loading all translations at once, messages can be loaded asynchronously when a user loads the app or switches to another language. This can be done by setting option loadLanguagesAsync to true and by configuring langDir and langFiles to match your setup.

Say your files are organized this way:

nuxt/
├── lang/
│   ├── en-US.js
│   ├── es-ES.js
│   ├── fr-FR.js
├── nuxt.config.js

Your config could then reflect this files structure to let the module load messages from your translations files:

// nuxt.config.js

{
  // ...
  ['nuxt-i18n', {
    locales: [
      {
        code: 'en',
        iso: 'en-US',
        name: 'English'
      },
      {
        code: 'fr',
        iso: 'fr-FR',
        name: 'Français'
      },
      {
        code: 'es',
        iso: 'es-ES',
        name: 'Español'
      }
    ],
    loadLanguagesAsync: true,
    langDir: 'lang/',
    langFiles: {
      en: 'en-US.js',
      fr: 'fr-FR.js',
      es: 'es-ES.js'
    }
  }],
  // ...
}

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
locales	Array		A list of objects that describes the locales available in your app, each object should contain at least a code key
defaultLocale	String		The app's default locale, URLs for this language won't be prefixed with the locale code
vueI18n	Object		Configuration options for vue-i18n, refer to the doc for supported options
routes	Object		Custom routing configuration, if routes are omitted, Nuxt's default routes are used
ignorePaths	Array		A list of paths that should not be localized
noPrefixDefaultLocale	Boolean	true	By default, paths generated for the default language don't contain a locale prefix, set this option to false to disable this behavior
redirectRootToLocale	String		Specify a locale to which the user should be redirected when visiting root URL (/), doesn't do anything if noPrefixDefaultLocale is enabled
seo	Boolean	true	Set to false to disable SEO metadata generation
loadLanguagesAsync	Boolean	false	If true, the module will attempt to asynchronously load translations from files defined in langFiles, when using this, vueI18n.messages can be omitted
langDir	String	'lang/'	Directory in which translations files are stored (used when loading translations asynchronously)
langFiles	Object	{}	An object that maps each locale to a translations file from langDir (used when loading translations asynchronously)

Configuration example

Here's an example configuration for an app that supports English and French, with English as the default and fallback language and some custom routes. You'll probably want to split the configuration accross multiple files to avoid bloating nuxt.config.js.

// nuxt.config.js

module.exports = {
  modules: [
    ['nuxt-i18n', {
      locales: [
        {
          code: 'en',
          iso: 'en-US',
          name: 'English'
        },
        {
          code: 'fr',
          iso: 'fr-FR',
          name: 'Français'
        }
      ],
      defaultLocale: 'en',
      noPrefixDefaultLocale: true,
      redirectRootToLocale: 'en',
      vueI18n: {
        messages: {
          fr: {
            home: 'Accueil',
            about: 'À propos',
            category: 'Catégorie'
          },
          en: {
            home: 'Homepage',
            about: 'About us',
            category: 'Category'
          }
        },
        fallbackLocale: 'en'
      },
      routes: {
        about: {
          fr: '/a-propos',
          en: '/about-us'
        },
        category: {
          fr: '/categorie'
        },
        'category/_slug': {
          fr: '/categorie/:slug'
        }
      },
      ignorePaths: [
        '/fr/notlocalized'
      ]
    }]
  ]
}

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) Paul Gascou-Vaillancourt (@paulgv)