How to start with i18next in the node application

This article will show how to start i18next in a node project.

i18next

i18next is one of the libraries I included in my list of 5 interesting internationalization libraries. On the project page, it's called internationalization-framework, and indeed it looked the most complete from the libraries I checked.

Package

To start, let's create a new package:

$ npm init -y

To make sure we can use es modules, let's add to package.json:

...
  "type": "module",
...

Dependecy

We can install i18next as a normal dependency with:

$ npm install --save i18next
npm WARN i18next-vanilla@1.0.0 No description
npm WARN i18next-vanilla@1.0.0 No repository field.

+ i18next@20.4.0
added 1 package from 1 contributor and audited 3 packages in 0.658s
found 0 vulnerabilities

Code

The minimal code needed to experiment with the library is index.js:

import i18next from "i18next";

i18next
  .init({
    lng: "en",
    resources: {
      en: {
        translation: {
          hello_world: "hello world",
        },
      },
    },
  })
  .then((t) => {
    console.log(t("hello_world"));
  });

Running

The code works as expected:

$ node index.js 
hello world

Links

• repository
• branch

Summary

In this article, we have started playing with i18next. Stay tuned for the following parts!