internationalizing a gem: conventions?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I need a pinch of help on internationalizing a gem. (Google Search thinks I want help on an internationalization gem, not the same thing.)

The question is, what is the accepted standard way to include $LANGUAGE.yml files in a gem, and get I18n to acknowledge it?

From looking at a few other gems I'm using, it looks like the usual way is to put it in lib/$GEMNAME/locale/$LANGUAGE.yml, or possibly config/locales (plural despite the other being singular, go fig). Either way, though, I don't see how it then gets picked up by I18n. (I've tried just putting it there and neither seems to work.) I could, in lib/$GEMNAME.rb or some such, add it to I18n.load_path. However, that seems rather brute-force, and like the kind of thing that there's probably already a convention for getting it done automagically, at least for Rails apps if not Ruby.

Or maybe I'm going about the whole setup the wrong way. Gemfile has:

gem '$GEMNAME', :git => 'davearonson/$GEMNAME', :branch => 'add-missing-translations'

(since I'm doing this in a Github-based fork of someone else's existing gem) and I've done:

bundle config local.$GEMNAME ~/path/to/project/$GEMNAME/

from the command line, and I'm doing this work in that directory. The Rails app itself is in a *parallel* directory, ~/path/to/project/$RAILSAPP. The other gems are down under vendor (bundle install --path vendor); would it work better if I put this one down there with them? Putting garbage in lib/$GEMNAME.rb does make Rails barf, so I know Rails is picking up the gem from the right place. Did I maybe miss some step?

(And before someone says "well you shouldn't be using a variable there, put the actual name", I'm just using $GEMNAME as a placeholder in this message; for real, I did actually use the real gem name.)

Thanks, Dave

2

In my experience with Rails 2.3, you need to add your I18n**.**load_path. Here’s my creaky old example:

https://github.com/kete/kete_gets_trollied/blob/master/rails/init.rb#L13

3

This is for 3.2, but since nobody has come forth with an "Oh, yeah, just stick it in lib/$GEMNAME/magic/locales/loadme/whizbang/$LANGUAGE.yml and it'll get slurped right up", I ass-u-me'd that was still the case. I put it in config/locales/en.yml like the gem author said to do, added that dir to the load_path, and it works fine.

Thanks, Dave

4

It’s probably worth mentioned that this was done in an config.to_prepare block:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html