openlocale

Self-hostable, live-server translation management. Manage translation keys, languages, and translations in a web UI with a full audit trail — and let your apps fetch translations at runtime with live updates: change a string in the dashboard and every connected client updates without a redeploy.

An open-source alternative to Lokalise / Phrase / Crowdin that you run yourself.

Features

• Live delivery — CDN-friendly bundle endpoints with ETag/304 revalidation plus an SSE stream; the @openlocale/sdk and @openlocale/i18next-backend clients apply updates in running apps within milliseconds
• Every common file format — import/export JSON (flat & nested), YAML, gettext PO, XLIFF 1.2/2.0, CSV, Apple .strings, Android strings.xml (plurals ⇄ ICU), Java .properties, and Flutter ARB
• Intelligent dedupe — imports detect keys whose values duplicate existing translations (exact, normalized, fuzzy trigram) and let you merge or alias instead of paying twice for the same string
• Audit trail — every change records who, when, old → new, and source (UI / API / import / AI), with per-string version history and rollback
• Federated login — email/password plus per-org OIDC connectors (Google Workspace, Okta, Entra ID, Auth0, dex, …) with automatic org membership
• API-first — documented REST API (OpenAPI at /api/docs), scoped API tokens, and a CLI (openlocale pull/push) for CI pipelines
• SQLite or Postgres — zero-config single file by default; Postgres (with multi-instance live events via LISTEN/NOTIFY) when you need it
• AI translation (paid, license key) — batch machine translation using Chrome's built-in on-device Translator when available, with a server-side Claude fallback, plus AI-assisted semantic duplicate detection. The core product is free and fully functional without a license.

Quick start (development)

corepack enable && corepack prepare pnpm@9.15.0 --activate
pnpm install
pnpm seed        # demo data: admin@example.com / password1234, public project "demo"
pnpm dev         # http://localhost:5199  ·  API docs at /api/docs

Try the live loop:

# watch the event stream…
curl -N localhost:5199/api/v1/cdn/demo/events
# …then edit any string in the editor UI and watch the event arrive.
curl -i localhost:5199/api/v1/cdn/demo/en.json        # bundle with ETag

Run the example app (examples/i18next-demo) with pnpm --filter i18next-demo dev, then edit strings in the dashboard — the page updates without a reload.

Using it in your app

// vanilla — @openlocale/sdk
import { createClient } from "@openlocale/sdk";
const ol = createClient({ endpoint: "https://locale.example.com", project: "demo" });
await ol.load("es");
ol.t("checkout.title");
ol.on("update", () => rerender());

// i18next — @openlocale/i18next-backend
import i18next from "i18next";
import { OpenLocaleBackend } from "@openlocale/i18next-backend";

i18next.use(OpenLocaleBackend).init({
  lng: "es",
  backend: { endpoint: "https://locale.example.com", project: "demo" }
});

# CI — @openlocale/cli
openlocale init --endpoint https://locale.example.com --project demo
openlocale pull --locale all --format json-nested --out ./locales
openlocale push ./locales/en.json --locale en --dry-run   # exits 2 on duplicates

Private projects pass a read-scoped API token (apiKey option / OPENLOCALE_TOKEN).

Self-hosting

One Node process serves the UI, API, and delivery endpoints.

docker build -t openlocale .
docker run -p 3000:3000 -v openlocale-data:/data \
  -e OPENLOCALE_DB_URL=file:/data/openlocale.db \
  -e OPENLOCALE_AUTH_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
  -e OPENLOCALE_BASE_URL=https://locale.example.com \
  openlocale

Configuration lives in environment variables — see .env.example. Migrations run automatically on boot. For Postgres, start from docker-compose.yml and set OPENLOCALE_DB_URL.

If you put a reverse proxy in front, make sure it doesn't buffer text/event-stream responses (nginx: proxy_buffering off; for /api/v1/cdn/*/events). The SDK falls back to polling if SSE is stripped.

Monorepo layout

Package	Published	What it is
apps/web	—	SvelteKit admin UI + hosts the Hono API
packages/api	—	REST v1, OpenAPI, SSE, auth, rate limiting
packages/db	—	Drizzle schemas (SQLite + Postgres), repos, event bus
packages/formats	✓	Parsers/serializers for all supported file formats
packages/sdk	✓	Runtime delivery client (browser + Node)
packages/i18next-backend	✓	i18next plugin with live reload
packages/cli	✓	openlocale push/pull CLI
packages/dedupe	—	Normalization, hashing, trigram matching
packages/license	—	Ed25519 license verification
packages/translate	—	MT provider interface + Claude provider

Development

pnpm test                     # unit + integration (in-memory sqlite)
docker compose up -d postgres
OPENLOCALE_TEST_PG_URL=postgres://openlocale:openlocale@localhost:5433/openlocale pnpm test:pg
pnpm --filter web check       # svelte-check / typescript
cd apps/web && npx playwright test   # e2e smoke (needs pnpm seed first)

Local SSO testing: docker compose up -d dex, then register a connector with issuer http://localhost:5556/dex (see dev/dex-config.yaml) and set OPENLOCALE_TRUSTED_ORIGINS=http://localhost:5556.

License

Code in this repository is MIT-licensed. AI features check for a signed license key at runtime (see packages/license); everything else runs without one, forever.