i18next-cli-comment

Unofficial fork of i18next-cli: same unified, high-performance i18next CLI toolchain (SWC), plus extensions such as per-locale strings inside // t(...) comments. Upstream copyright and license: see LICENSE.

An extension for i18next-cli that adds automatic language tracking and structured output for translation files.

✨ Features

• 🌍 Automatically tracks used languages
• 📁 Stores translations in per-language directories (/locales/{lang}/})
• ✍️ Safely updates files without overwriting other locales
• ⚙️ Flexible path configuration using templates
• 🔄 Fully compatible with existing i18next setups

📦 Installation

npm install i18next-cli-comment --save-dev

or

yarn add i18next-cli-comment -D

🚀 Quick Start

Run Initialisation:

npx i18next-cli-comment init

⚙️ Configuration (i18next.config.ts)

| Option | Type | Description | | --------- | -------- | ------------------------------------------------- | | locales | string[] | List of supported languages | | input | string | Input path which directory tracking | | output | string | Output path template (must included {{language}}/{{namespace}}.json) |

🧠 How it works

1. The CLI scans your project files
2. Extracts translation keys (e.g. t('key', {en: 'Some words', ua: 'Будь-які слова'}))
3. Determines active languages
4. Generates or updates translation files:

/locales
  /en
    translation.json
  /ua
    translation.json
  /de
    translation.json

📄 Example

Source code:

//t('key', {en: 'Some words', ua: 'Будь-які слова'})

Generated output:

locales/en/translation.json

{
  "key": "Some words"
}

locales/ua/translation.json

{
  "key": "Будь-які слова"
}

🔧 CLI Commands(same from i18next-cli)

# extract translations
npx i18next-cli-comment extract

# watch mode 
npx i18next-cli-comment extract --watch

# translation status
npx i18next-cli-comment status

# help
npx i18next-cli-comment help

✅ Benefits

• Clean and scalable structure
• Better collaboration in teams

🔮 Roadmap

• Improve extract method
• Add support for detecting t() function calls from i18next-cli
• Fix updating values when new language provided or added

🤝 Contributing

Contributions and suggestions are welcome!