This document is for CakePHP's development version, which can be significantly different
from previous releases.
You may want to read
current stable release documentation instead.
I18N Tool¶
The i18n features of CakePHP use po files as their translation source. PO files integrate with commonly used translation tools like Poedit.
The i18n commands provides a quick way to generate po template files. These templates files can then be given to translators so they can translate the strings in your application. Once you have translations done, pot files can be merged with existing translations to help update your translations.
Generating POT Files¶
POT files can be generated for an existing application using the extract
command. This command will scan your entire application for __() style
function calls, and extract the message string. Each unique string in your
application will be combined into a single POT file:
bin/cake i18n extract
The above will run the extraction shell. The result of this command will be the
file resources/locales/default.pot. You use the pot file as a template for creating
po files. If you are manually creating po files from the pot file, be sure to
correctly set the Plural-Forms header line.
Generating POT Files for Plugins¶
You can generate a POT file for a specific plugin using:
bin/cake i18n extract --plugin <Plugin>
This will generate the required POT files used in the plugins.
Extracting from multiple folders at once¶
Sometimes, you might need to extract strings from more than one directory of
your application. For instance, if you are defining some strings in the
config directory of your application, you probably want to extract strings
from this directory as well as from the src directory. You can do it by
using the --paths option. It takes a comma-separated list of absolute paths
to extract:
bin/cake i18n extract --paths /var/www/app/config,/var/www/app/src
Excluding Folders¶
You can pass a comma separated list of folders that you wish to be excluded. Any path containing a path segment with the provided values will be ignored:
bin/cake i18n extract --exclude vendor,tests
Skipping Overwrite Warnings for Existing POT Files¶
By adding --overwrite, the shell script will no longer warn you if a POT
file already exists and will overwrite by default:
bin/cake i18n extract --overwrite
Extracting Messages from the CakePHP Core Libraries¶
By default, the extract shell script will ask you if you like to extract
the messages used in the CakePHP core libraries. Set --extract-core to yes
or no to set the default behavior:
bin/cake i18n extract --extract-core yes
// or
bin/cake i18n extract --extract-core no