The Drupal Console is multilingual

Jesus Manuel Olivas

January 06, 2015

We are getting close hope by the end of this week, to a code-freeze on the development of this project, this code-freeze will be for about 4 weeks, in order to have time to work on the project documentation and prepare with David Flores aka @dmouse to present this project at DrupalCon Latino.

The first goal to complete before this code-freeze was add multilingual capabilities to the project, but why?, I can list a few reasons.

Drupal is multilingual and Drupal 8 is even more than ever, you can take a look a the D8MI at http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/ and we want to ship this project with similar capabilities.
It feels good and more natural to use a tool on your mother tongue, and by the way most of our project contributors are not native english speakers.
Separate messages from code will ease the text messages updates, no need to know/learn PHP or use an IDE to contribute.
We (David Flores & myself) will be presenting a sesion in Spanish, related to this project at the DrupalCon Latino in Bogota, and at some point we decide making project multilingual will be interesting for the event audience.

As I mentioned on twitter:

Code look a little hacky but got a translatable version of #Drupal Console commands, feature will be available on the next release. #drupal8
— Jesus Manuel Olivas (@jmolivas) January 2, 2015

But wee need a starting point.

Talking about code, this is what was required

Adding the Symfony Translation Component to the composer.json file


"require": {
    ...
+   "symfony/config": "2.6.*",
+   "symfony/translation": "2.6.*",
    ...
},

For more information about the Translation Component look the awesome symfony documentation here.

Add translation files and messages


# extract of config/translations/console.en.yml
command:
  cache:
    rebuild:
      description: Rebuild and clear all site caches.
      options:
        cache: Only clean a specific cache.
      messages:
        welcome: Welcome to the cache:rebuild command.
        rebuild: Rebuilding cache(s), wait a moment please.
        completed: Done cleaning cache(s).
        invalid_cache: Cache "%s" is invalid.
      questions:
        cache: Select cache.

Actually four languages files are available (en, es, fr and pt) you can find those files here, take note those files are only a copy of the console.en.yml file with few overrides for testing purposes.

Create a new Helper class

In order to take care of the translation the TranslatorHelper class was added see code here, the Helper was also registered at bin/conosle.php see code here

Inject the TranslatorHelper

For this task was necessary to modify the RegisterCommandsHelper class, obtaining the TranslatorHelper and Injecting via the constructor when creating and registering a new instance of each command.


if ($cmd->getConstructor()->getNumberOfRequiredParameters()>0) {
  $translator = $this->getHelperSet()->get('translator');
  $command = $cmd->newInstance($translator);
}
else {
  $command = $cmd->newInstance();
}
$this->console->add($command);

You can see the full class here

How can you help

Feel free to take a look at the messages at the github repo and send us fixes.

How to override the default language

As simple as creating a new YAML file at your home directory ~/.console/config.yml and override the language value.


#file path ~/.console/config.yml
application:
  language: es

How to make a console.phar

We are using and recommend this great project http://box-project.org/


$ curl -LSs https://box-project.github.io/box2/installer.php | php
$ mv box.phar /usr/local/bin/box

// Run this inside your project directory to create a new console.phar file
$ box build

Feel free to try this new multilingual feature on the latest release v0.6.0, and as usual feel free to ask any questions commenting on this page, or adding a new issue on the drupal project page or the github repository.

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