Paulo Castellano

Posted on Mar 7, 2022 • Updated on Jan 29, 2023 • Originally published at paulocastellano.com

How to work with laravel, inertia js, and vue-i18n

The last week i lost some hours trying to make inertia js and vue-i18n works together in changelogfy. But some people from inertiajs discord community help to understand and make it works, very thanks 🙏

To help some people to understand the process, I decided to create this post blog.

I will centralize all my languages files at laravel default translates, in the folder resources/lang.

I think is a great way to deliver i18n to the front and backend with the same translated files.

But vuejs requires JSON language files, not PHP.

To convert all our PHP translate files to JSON, we will install the composer package bellow:

composer require librenms/laravel-vue-i18n-generator

Publish the package configs:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="MartinLindhe\VueInternationalizationGenerator\GeneratorProvider"

Now let's run this command to convert files:

php artisan vue-i18n:generate

A file will be created by default in resources/js/vue-i18n-locales.generated.js

This file contains all your languages.

Important:
You need run the command above every time you added new translations or every deployment of your application!

Now let's install the vue-i18n package.

npm install vue-i18n@next

If you like to give power to user changes automatically your language, you can send locale to view by HandleInertiaRequests middleware.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Middleware;

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Session;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Inertia\Middleware;

class HandleInertiaRequests extends Middleware
{
    protected $rootView = 'app';

    public function version(Request $request)
    {
        return parent::version($request);
    }

    public function share(Request $request)
    {
        return array_merge(parent::share($request), [
            'user' => function () use ($request) {
                if (!$request->user()) {
                    return;
                }
            },
            'locale' => app()->getLocale()
        ]);
    }
}

Now let's set up the resources/js/app.js, to use vue-18n and use the current user language send by HandleInertiaRequests middleware.

import { createI18n } from "vue-i18n";
import localeMessages from "./vue-i18n-locales.generated";

import { createApp, h } from "vue";
import { createInertiaApp } from "@inertiajs/inertia-vue3";

createInertiaApp({
    resolve: (name) => require(`./Pages/${name}.vue`),
    setup({ el, app, props, plugin }) {
        const i18n = createI18n({
            locale: props.initialPage.props.locale, // user locale by props
            fallbackLocale: "en", // set fallback locale
            messages: localeMessages, // set locale messages
        });

        return createApp({ render: () => h(app, props) })
            .use(plugin)
            .use(i18n)
            .mixin({
                methods: {
                    route
                },
            })
            .mount(el);
    },
});

Now you can use vue-18n in any view like this:

<template>
    <h1>
        {{ t("home.title") }}
    </h1>
</template>
<script>
import { useI18n } from "vue-i18n";
export default {
    setup() {
        const { t } = useI18n({});
        return { t };
    },
}
</script>

I hope I helped you ✌️

Top comments (6)

William Okafor • Aug 25 '22 • Edited

Thanks for the walkthrough.

If you're trying to follow this tutorial, I'd suggest you use this package instead as laravel-vue-i18n-generator package is no longer being maintained.

Compiled language file name is different but the underlying logic is the same.

An alternative might be to store the languages as a json file instead and then load this into the HandleInertiaRequests class based off the current locale.

For instance:

Add this into the class

private function getTranslationFile($code)
    {
        $jsonString = [];
        if (File::exists(base_path('<your-lang-folder>/'.$code.'.json'))) {
            $jsonString = file_get_contents(base_path('lang/'.$code.'.json'));
            $jsonString = json_decode($jsonString, true);
        }

        return $jsonString;
    }

Then update the share method to include:

return array_merge(parent::share($request), [
            ...
            'content' => $this->getTranslationFile(session()->get('locale') ?? 'en'),
            ...
        ]);