Localize Tools CLI

The Locale Tools CLI is a command line interface tool that you use to get a better development experience (DX) when working with the @angular/localize package in Angular apps directly from a command shell.

It is useful for small and medium teams of developers that don't have specialized translators.

Current features

Currently the package only works with the JSON file format. You could read more about translation file formats in the Angular documentation.

The current utilities/commands are:

• Order translations based on source translations order
• Remove unused translations based on source translations
• Show missing translations based on source translations
• Add missing translations on each translations files

Installing Localize Tools CLI

Install the CLI using the npm package manager, inside your Angular project:

npm install --save-dev localize-tools-cli

Basic workflow

Invoke the tool on the command line through the npx localize-tools executable. Enter the following to list commands or options for a given command with a short description.

npx localize-tools-cli help
npx localize-tools-cli order --help

Configuration

To run the available commands, you must pass two mandatory settings:

1. Path of messages file (relative to the current working directory), generated by the command ng extract-i18n --output-path. Read more here.
2. Paths of translations files (relative to the current working directory). Read more here.

You can do this in two ways:

# First
npx localize-tools-cli order -c=./ltcconfig.json

# Second
npx localize-tools-cli order -s=./messages.json --translations=./messages.pt.json,./messages.es.json

For the first way, the configuration file must have the following pattern:

{
  "source": "./src/locale/messages.json",
  "translations": [
    "./src/locale/messages.pt.json"
  ]
}

Recommended setup

We recommend that you add the following commands to your package.json (inside the scripts section):

{
  "scripts": {
    "i18n:generate": "ng extract-i18n --output-path src/locale --format json",
    "i18n:order": "npx localize-tools-cli order -c=./ltcconfig.json",
    "i18n:remove-unused": "npx localize-tools-cli remove-unused -c=./ltcconfig.json",
    "i18n:organize": "npm run i18n:remove-unused && npm run i18n:order",
    "i18n:get-missing": "npx localize-tools-cli get-missing -c=./ltcconfig.json"
  }
}

Whenever you finish a feature, you can execute the commands like this:

npm run i18n:generate # extract translations
npm run i18n:remove-unused # remove unused translations
npm run i18n:get-missing # or npm run i18n:get-missing -- --add to add missing keys directly to files

At this point, you should have the missing translations printed in your terminal or added in your translations files. After translating, you can run the following command to organize the files:

npm run i18n:organize

This flow will help you to keep your files organized, without useless and orderly translations.