Gatsby plugin i18n

This plugin is meant to be used with netlify and its gatsby-plugin-netlify to correctly handle redirects server side. A less SEO friendly alternative would be to use this plugin alongside gatsby-plugin-meta-redirect or gatsby-plugin-client-side-redirect, they all exploit the gatsby’s createRedirect action.

Localised messages

• Components specific string are prefixed by the component name in PascalCase, e.g. for component Header the string prefix is Header.
• Pages and templates specific strings are prefixed by the page component name all lowercase minus the prefix Pages or Template, e.g. for page about the component would be PagesAbout and the string prefix is about., for the template blog-single the component would be TemplateBlogSingle and the string prefix is blogsingle
• Generic strings not tight to any component or page in particular are prefxed with a . dot and begin lowercase, e.g. .globalMessage

Known issues

• Gatsby generates a warning like:

warn There are routes that match both page and redirect.
It will result in page not being accessible; this is
probably not intentional:
 - page: "/" and redirect: "/" -> "/it/"

That is fine as the redirect is created with the Language Netlify’s specific option for createRedirect and therefore the warning message is misleading as it does not take into account the language based redirect.

• Gatsby’s warnings:

warn Plugin `@kuus/gatsby-plugin-i18n` has customized the
 built-in Gatsby GraphQL type `File`. This is allowed,
but could potentially cause conflicts.
warn Plugin `gatsby-plugin-mdx` has customized the
GraphQL type `Mdx`, which has already been defined by the
 plugin `@kuus/gatsby-plugin-i18n`. This could
potentially cause conflicts.

are fine… We need to customise those Node’s types to have a seamless localization API.

Resources

• Netlify redirects adn localization
• Gatsby netlify plugin

• Examples of internationalised Gatsby sites:

  • overreacted.io We might get from there the mechanism that scan the markdown files and auto-localise links.

• Articles:

  • Building i18n with Gatsby
  • Building a multilingual static site with Gatsby

• About 404:

  • Gatsby 404 localised 404 pages
  • Creating prefixed 404 pages for different locales

Similar projects

There are many on npm.

• gatsby-plugin-intl
• using-i18n
• gatsby-plugin-i18n
• gatsby-i18n-plugin
• gatsby-plugin-intl-url
• gatsby-theme-i18n
• gatsby-plugin-translate-urls
• gatsby-theme-localization

Issues

Language based redirects

Those that use Language: locale in the createRedirect method, they seem to do not work at the moment, see this issue or this one for instance.

Trailing slashes

Netlify when loading a page directly or refreshing the browser when you are on a page without a trailing slash it will redirect to the same url with a trailing slash, this happens even with Pretty URLS setting disabled on Netlify panel. See this issue. Until this issue with netlify is not solved we set by default trailing slashed on all paths with the util normaliseUrlPath.

Custom slugs

• Custom slugs and Netlify CMS

TODO:

• Add support for server side redirects in frontmatter, see Programmatic Redirects in Gatsby