README.md

⚠️ This repo is no longer maintained! Please visit https://github.com/PhraseApp-Blog/nodejs-tutorial-on-creating-a-multilingual-web-app for the up-to-date repo.

Node.js Tutorial on Creating a Multilingual Web App

This repository contains the source code for creating a multilingual web application in Node.js, without the need to install any external localization or internationalization library.

Glob

Glob is a library to match files using the patterns the shell uses, such as stars and stuff.

npm install glob

Language Files

Language files will be stored in the JSON data format, which is convertible into JavaScript objects.

{
  "pricing_table": "Pricing Tables",
  "basic": "Basic",
  "pro": "Pro",
  "premium": "Premium",
  "storage": "Storage",
  "email": "Emails",
  "domain": "Domains",
  "sign_up": "Sign Up",
  "cost_basic": "$ 10",
  "cost_pro": "$ 25",
  "cost_premium": "$ 50",
  "per_month": "per month"
}

Index.js

This is the main file for your Node.js server.

var fs = require('fs');
var http = require('http');
var url = require('url');
var glob = require( 'glob' );
var language_dict = {};

glob.sync( './language/*.json' ).forEach( function( file ) {
  let dash = file.split("/");
  if(dash.length == 3) {
    let dot = dash[2].split(".");
    if(dot.length == 2) {
      let lang = dot[0];
      fs.readFile(file, function(err, data) {
        language_dict[lang] = JSON.parse(data.toString());
      });
    }
  }
});

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  var q = url.parse(req.url, true);
  var lang = 'en';
  let dash = q.pathname.split("/");
  if(dash.length >= 2) {
    let code = dash[1];
    if(code !== '' && language_dict.hasOwnProperty(code)) {
      lang = code;
    }
  }

  fs.readFile('index.html', function(err, data) {
    res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=utf-8'});
    let data_string = data.toString()
    for (var key of Object.keys(language_dict[lang])) {
      let pattern = new RegExp("{{" + key + "}}", "g");
      data_string = data_string.replace(pattern, language_dict[lang][key]);
    }
    res.write(data_string);
    return res.end();
  });
}).listen(8080);

Running Node.js server

node index.js

Loading the web app in your browser

Simply modify the url based on the language code.

http://localhost:8080/en

For German internationalization, go to the following url

http://localhost:8080/de