Polyglot is a fast, painless, open-source internationalization plugin for Jekyll blogs. Polyglot is easy to setup and use with any Jekyll project, and it scales to the languages you want to support. With fallback support for missing content, automatic url relativization, and powerful SEO tools, Polyglot allows any multi-language jekyll blog to focus on content without the cruft.
Jekyll doesn't provide native support for multi-language blogs. This plugin was modeled after the jekyll-multiple-languages-plugin, whose implementation I liked, but execution I didn't.
Add jekyll-polyglot to your Gemfile
if you are using Bundler:
group :jekyll_plugins do
gem "jekyll-polyglot"
end
Or install the gem manually by doing gem install jekyll-polyglot
and specify the plugin using _config.yml
:
plugins:
- jekyll-polyglot
In your _config.yml
file, add the following preferences
languages: ["en", "sv", "de", "fr"]
default_lang: "en"
exclude_from_localization: ["javascript", "images", "css", "public"]
parallel_localization: true
These configuration preferences indicate
- what i18n languages you wish to support
- what is your default "fallback" language for your content
- what root level files/folders are excluded from localization, based
on if their paths start with any of the excluded regexp substrings. (this is different than the jekyll
exclude: [ .gitignore ]
; you shouldexclude
files and directories in your repo you dont want in your built site at all, andexclude_from_localization
files and directories you want to see in your built site, but not in your sublanguage sites.) - whether to run language processing in parallel or serial
The optional lang_from_path: true
option enables getting page
language from the first or second path segment, e.g de/first-one.md
, or
_posts/zh_Hans_HK/use-second-segment.md
, if the lang frontmatter isn't defined.
When adding new posts and pages, add to the YAML front matter:
lang: sv
or whatever appropriate I18n language code the page should build for. And you're done. Ideally, when designing your site, you should organize files by their relative urls.
Polyglot works by associating documents with similar permalinks to the lang
specified in their frontmatter. Files that correspond to similar routes should have identical permalinks. If you don't provide a permalink for a post, make sure you are consistent with how you place and name corresponding files:
_posts/2010-03-01-salad-recipes-en.md
_posts/2010-03-01-salad-recipes-sv.md
_posts/2010-03-01-salad-recipes-fr.md
Organized names will generate consistent permalinks when the post is rendered, and polyglot will know to build seperate language versions of
the website using only the files with the correct lang
variable in the front matter.
In short:
- Be consistent with how you name and place your posts files
- Always give your pages permalinks in the frontmatter
- Don't overthink it, 😉
Lets say you are building your website. You have an /about/
page written in english, german and
swedish. You are also supporting a french website, but you never designed a french version of your /about/
page!
No worries. Polyglot ensures the sitemap of your english site matches your french site, matches your swedish and german sites too. In this case, because you specified a default_lang
variable in your _config.yml
, all sites missing their languages' counterparts will fallback to your default_lang
, so content is preserved across different languages of your site.
No need to meticulously manage anchor tags to link to your correct language. Polyglot modifies how pages get written to the site so your french links keep vistors on your french blog.
---
title: au sujet de notre entreprise
permalink: /about/
lang: fr
---
Nous sommes un restaurant situé à Paris . [Ceci est notre menu.](/menu/)
becomes
<header class="post-header">
<h1 class="post-title">au sujet de notre entreprise</h1>
</header>
<article class="post-content">
<p>Nous sommes un restaurant situé à Paris . <a href="/fr/menu/">Ceci est notre menu.</a></p>
</article>
Notice the link <a href="/fr/menu/">...
directs to the french website.
Even if you are falling back to default_lang
page, relative links built on the french site will still link to french pages.
If you defined a site url
in your _config.yaml
, polyglot will automatically relativize absolute links pointing to your website directory:
---
lang: fr
---
Cliquez [ici]({{site.url}}) pour aller à l'entrée du site.
becomes
<p>Cliquez <a href="https://mywebsite.com/fr/">ici</a> pour aller à l'entrée du site.
New in 1.4.0 If you dont want a href attribute to be relativized (such as for making a language switcher), you can use the block tag:
{% static_href %}href="..."{% endstatic_href %}
<a {% static_href %}href="/about"{% endstatic_href %}>click this static link</a>
that will generate <a href="/about">click this static link</a>
which is what you would normally use to create a url unmangled by invisible language relativization.
Combine with a html minifier for a polished and production ready website.
New in 1.4.0
If you want to control which languages a document can be generated for, you can specify lang-exclusive: [ ]
frontmatter.
If you include this frontmatter in your post, it will only generate for the specified site languages.
For Example, the following frontmatter will only generate in the en
and fr
site language builds:
---
lang-exclusive: ['en', 'fr']
---
New in 1.5.0
Polyglot will only start builds after it confirms there is a cpu core ready to accept the build thread. This ensures that jekyll will build large sites efficiently streamlining build processes instead of overloading machines with process thrash.
There are cases when site.data
localization is required.
For instance: you might need to localize _data/navigation.yml
that holds "navigation menu".
In order to localize it, just place language-specific files in _data/:lang/...
folder, and Polyglot will bring those keys to the top level.
This plugin makes modifications to existing Jekyll classes and modules, namely Jekyll::StaticFile
and Jekyll::Site
. These changes are as lightweight and slim as possible. The biggest change is in Jekyll::Site.process
. Polyglot overwrites this method to instead spawn a separate process for each language you intend to process the site for. Each of those processes calls the original Jekyll::Site.process
method with its language in mind, ensuring your website scales to support any number of languages, while building all of your site languages simultaneously.
Jekyll::Site.process
is the entry point for the Jekyll build process. Take care whatever other plugins you use do not also attempt to overwrite this method. You may have problems.
This plugin stands out from other I18n Jekyll plugins.
- automatically corrects your relative links, keeping your french visitors on your french website, even when content has to fallback to the
default_lang
. - builds all versions of your website simultaneously, allowing big websites to scale efficiently.
- provides the liquid tag
{{ site.languages }}
to get an array of your I18n strings. - provides the liquid tag
{{ site.default_lang }}
to get the default_lang I18n string. - provides the liquid tag
{{ site.active_lang }}
to get the I18n language string the website was built for. Alternative names foractive_lang
can be configured viaconfig.lang_vars
. - provides the liquid tag
{{ I18n_Headers https://yourwebsite.com/ }}
to append SEO bonuses to your website. - provides the liquid tag
{{ Unrelativized_Link href="/hello" }}
to make urls that do not get influenced by url correction regexes. - provides
site.data
localization for efficient rich text replacement. - a creator that will answer all of your questions and issues.
Jekyll-polyglot has a few spectacular Search Engine Optimization techniques to ensure your Jekyll blog gets the most out of it's multilingual audience. Check them out!
Feel free to open a PR and list your multilingual blog here you may want to share:
- Polyglot project website
- LogRhythm Corporate Website
- All Over Earth
- Hanare Cafe in Toshijima, Japan
- F-Droid
- Ubuntu MATE
- Leo3418 blog
Currently supports Jekyll 3.0 , and Jekyll 4.0
- Windows users will need to disable parallel_localization on their machines by setting
parallel_localization: false
in the_config.yml
- In Jekyll 4.0 , SCSS source maps will generate improperly due to how Polyglot operates. The workaround is to disable the CSS sourcemaps. Adding the following to your
config.yml
will disable sourcemap generation:
sass:
sourcemap: never
Please! I need all the support I can get! 🙏
But for real I would appreciate any contributions and support. This started as an open-source side-project and has gotten bigger than I'd ever imagine! If you have something you'd like to contribute to jekyll-polyglot, please open a PR!
- - site language: portuguese
pt_BR
pt_PT
- - site language: arabic
ar
- - site language: japanese
ja
- - site language: russian
ru
- - site language: dutch
nl
- - site language: korean
ko
- - site language: hebrew
he
- - get whitelisted as an official github-pages jekyll plugin
- - update CI provider
Copyright (c) Samuel Volin 2022. License: MIT