kidgodzilla / ember-i18next

Integrates i18next into Ember CLI apps.

Ember-i18next

About

An Ember CLI addon for internationalizing Ember.js applications using the i18next library. The addon provides an Ember service that wraps i18next and a Handlebars helper for displaying localized text in templates.

This addon is under development and is probably not suitable for production use. Buyer beware.

Note: This addon uses the Streams API, which is only present in Ember.js 1.9.0 and later. In particular, it targets the Stream and HTMLBars APIs available in Ember 1.10.0 and later. Earlier releases of Ember are not supported.

Installation

To install with Ember CLI >= 0.2.3:

ember install ember-i18next

To install with Ember CLI 0.1.5 - 0.2.2:

ember install:addon ember-i18next

For older versions:

npm install --save-dev ember-i18next
bower install --save i18next

Configuration

Configuring i18next

To configure the default locale and the options used to initialize i18next, you can add them to your environment.js:

// ...
var ENV = {
  // ...
  defaultLocale: 'en-US',
  i18nextOptions: {
    // any options supported by i18next
  },
  APP: {
    // ...
  }
}

If you do not specify any options, the default i18next options will be used.

Initializing i18next

To initialize the i18next library, call the i18n service's initLibraryAsync method. This method returns a promise that resolves when the library finishes initializing, so if you call it in one of the model hook methods (beforeModel, model, afterModel), the application will enter the loading substate until i18next is initialized.

Including Locale Files

By default, i18next loads locale files from the server asynchronously from the server path configured using the resGetPath configuration option. To copy your application's locale resources from your source tree to the expected path during build, modify the application's Brocfile.js:

/* global require, module */
var EmberApp = require('ember-cli/lib/broccoli/ember-app');
var funnel = require('broccoli-funnel');

var app = new EmberApp();

var locales = funnel('app/locales', {
  srcDir: '/',
  destDir:  '/locales'
});

module.exports = app.toTree(locales);

In this example, locale files are recursively copied from the application's app/locales/ directory to dist/locales/ when the application is built.

Use

Service

If you need to produce translated strings in routes, components or controllers, you can inject the i18n service using the Ember.inject API. This will then give access to i18next's t() function in your code. For example:

// app/components/example-component.js
import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Component.extend({
  i18n: Ember.inject.service(),
  messages: someObject,

  messageCount: Ember.computed('messages', function () {
    var i18n = this.get('i18n');
    var count = this.get('messages.count');
    return i18n.t('messages.count', { msgCount: count });
  }
});

For convenience, a mixin is provided that injects the i18n service and adds a t() function to the including class. For example, the above could be accomplished using the mixin like this:

// app/components/example-component.js
import Ember from 'ember';
import I18nMixin from 'mixins/i18n';

export default Ember.Component.extend(I18nMixin, {
  messages: someObject,

  messageCount: Ember.computed('messages', function () {
    var count = this.get('messages.count');
    return this.t('messages.count', { msgCount: count })
  });
});

Handlebars Helper

You can access your app's translations in templates using the t helper:

<button type="button">{{t 'button.text'}}</button>

Pass values to be interpolated into the translation as hash arguments. For example, for a translation that includes an interpolated __count__ value:

<div>{{t 'messages.count' count=3}}</div>

Current Locale

The current locale is exposed via a locale property added to the i18n service. To change the language that the appliction is displayed in, simply set this property, and all of the text displayed using the t helper will be updated. For example, triggering the following controller action would update all of the text to Thai:

// app/controllers/example-controller.js
import Ember from 'ember';

export default Ember.Controller.extend(I18nMixin, {
  actions: {
    gimmeThai: function () {
      this.set('i18n.locale', 'th-TH');
    }
  }
});

Collaborating

Contributions are happily accepted. Make sure that your pull request includes tests and your JavaScript source is styled as described in the Ember.js JavaScript style guide.

Acknowledgements

The use of streams to update the user interface when the locale is changed is adapted from the ember-cli-i18n addon.