mlc-translate-server

mlc-translate-server is a minimal server which stores translations. It is designed to work with mlc-angularjs-translate.

How to use it

This server is supposed to be accessible only for admins/translators on your website.

This server is not designed to be accessible from any user. You should implement a proxy system from your website to cache the translations fetched via /query.

Example:

• I assume your website consist of 2 projects admin and website
• At each deployment you can use /query to download both translations
• Store the translations in files, 1 translation file per locale per group per project. For example:
  • translations/admin/group1/locale1.json
  • translations/website/login/en_GB.json
  • translations/website/login/fr_FR.json
  • translations/website/signup/en_GB.json
• Store the timestamps in translations/admin_timestamps.json and translations/website_timestamp.json
• Write a POST endpoint /query in your backend, which takes the parameters locale, project and group, and returns the content of the file translations/$project/$group/$locale.json.
• Now you can add custom rules, to forbid specific users to fetch some translations groups / projects:
  • only admin users should fetch the /admin translation groups, excepted the login group available for anyone, else you cannot translate the login page ..
  • you could store the translations of your emails in a group emails, and it should be accessible only from the backend, not on the frontend.

An upgrade could be to update the translations:

• periodically, using cron for example
• at each saved translation: this server could make a POST request on a specific endpoint of your backend, to inform it that there is a new translation available in a specific project/group.

Translation definition

A translation is made of several fields:

• locale: the locale of that translation (en_GB, fr_FR ...)
• project: in your website, you may have several distinct areas. You may wanna separate them, if so, use different projects names.
• group: in a project, the translation keys are stored in groups too. Helps to structure the translations inside a single project.
• key: the key to translate.
• value: the translation

Note: The database schema is clearly optimizable.

Features

• Stores the translations in a sqlite3 database.
• Each translation is stored by default, in order to show the different versions of a single translation through the time
• Has api endpoints to:
  • create a translation
  • remove a translation
  • make a query to fetch the translations which interest us (can select a locale, a project, a group etc...), with or without the history of each translation. Each group can be combined with its timestamp, to only fetch the groups that have expired.
• stores the creation date in the translations for cache support

TODO

• store in a cache file the timestamps, currently the timestamps are rebuilt by using the endpoints of the API.

Installation

Via Git

git clone https://github.com/moonlight-coding/mlc-translate-server.git
cd mlc-translate-server
npm i
# if you wanna use `mlc-translate-server` command
sudo npm link

Via NPM

npm install --save mlc-translate-server

Usage

mlc-translate-server server [config_path]
mlc-translate-server list <config_path>
mlc-translate-server export <config_path> <locale> <project> [outfile]
mlc-translate-server import <config_path> <locale> <project> <translationsFile>

Git installation

By default, you can create a config.js in this folder, use config.example.js. The command mlc-translate-server server uses that default config.js.

NPM installation

First, you need to create the config file from config.example.js. I suggest to name it mlc-translate-server.config.js.

You can run it via ./node_modules/.bin/mlc-translate-server mlc-translate-server.config.js.

Another way is to add in package.json a script command to do it:

"scripts": {
  "translate-server": "mlc-translate-server mlc-translate-server.config.js"
},

Doing so, you just need to use npm run translate-server to start the mlc-translate-server.