Continuous localization

There is infrastructure in place so that your translation closely follows development. This way translators can work on translations the entire time, instead of working through huge amount of new text just prior to release.

See also

Integrating with Weblate describes basic ways to integrate your development with Weblate. Code hosting integrations lists provider-specific setup steps for common code hosting sites.

This is the process:

1. Developers make changes and push them to the VCS repository.

2. Optionally the translation files are updated, see Introducing new strings.

3. Weblate pulls changes from the VCS repository, parses translation files and updates its database, see Updating repositories.

4. Translators submit translations using the Weblate web interface, or upload offline changes.

5. Once the translators are finished, Weblate commits the changes to the local repository (see Lazy commits).

6. Changes are pushed back to the upstream repository (see Pushing changes from Weblate).

Hint

Upstream code hosting is not necessary, you can use Weblate with Local files where there is only the repository inside Weblate.

Updating repositories

You should set up some way of updating backend repositories from their source.

• Use Notification hooks to integrate with the majority of common code hosting services, see Code hosting integrations. You must also Enable hooks for this to work.

• Manually trigger update either in the repository management or using Weblate’s REST API or Weblate Client

• Enable AUTO_UPDATE to automatically update all components on your Weblate instance

• Execute updategit (with selection of project or --all to update all)

Whenever Weblate updates the repository, the post-update addons will be triggered, see Add-ons.

Avoiding merge conflicts

The merge conflicts from Weblate arise when same file was changed both in Weblate and outside it. Depending on the situation, there are several approaches that might help here:

• Avoiding merge conflicts by changing translation files in Weblate only

• Avoiding merge conflicts by locking Weblate while doing outside changes

• Avoiding merge conflicts by focusing on Git operations

Avoiding merge conflicts by changing translation files in Weblate only

Avoiding edits outside Weblate is easy with monolingual files — you can add new strings within Weblate and leave whole editing of the files there. For bilingual files, there is usually some kind of message extraction process to generate translatable files from the source code. In some cases, this can be split into two parts:

1. The extraction generates template (for example gettext POT is generated using xgettext).

2. Further process merges it into actual translations (the gettext PO files are updated using msgmerge).

You can perform the second step within Weblate and it will ensure that all pending changes are included before this operation.

Avoiding merge conflicts by locking Weblate while doing outside changes

Integrating Weblate into your updating process so that it flushes changes before updating the files outside Weblate can be achieved by using Weblate’s REST API to force Weblate to push all pending changes and lock the translation while you are doing changes on your side.

The script for doing updates can look like this:

# Lock Weblate translation
wlc lock
# Push changes from Weblate to upstream repository
wlc push
# Pull changes from upstream repository to your local copy
git pull
# Update translation files, this example is for Django
./manage.py makemessages --keep-pot -a
git commit -m 'Locale updates' -- locale
# Push changes to upstream repository
git push
# Tell Weblate to pull changes (not needed if Weblate follows your repo
# automatically)
wlc pull
# Unlock translations
wlc unlock

If you have multiple components sharing the same repository, you need to lock them all separately:

wlc lock foo/bar
wlc lock foo/baz
wlc lock foo/baj

Note

The example uses Weblate Client, which needs configuration (API keys) to be able to control Weblate remotely. You can also achieve this using any HTTP client instead of Weblate Client, for example curl, see Weblate’s REST API.

Repository maintenance

The Repository maintenance view shows repository status for a project, component, or translation and lets privileged users run maintenance operations from the user interface.

The same actions can also be triggered using Weblate’s REST API or, for the supported subset, Weblate Client.

Availability of individual actions depends on permissions, the configured version control system, whether pushing is configured, and whether the selected object can be locked.

Action	What it does	Typical use
Commit	Commits pending changes stored in Weblate to the local repository.	Flush pending Weblate changes before doing repository work elsewhere.
Push	Pushes committed local repository changes to the configured upstream.	Send committed translations upstream when automatic push is disabled or delayed.
Update	Fetches upstream changes and integrates them using the component’s configured Merge style.	Bring Weblate in sync with upstream using the default integration strategy.
Update with merge	Fetches upstream changes and integrates them with an explicit merge.	Override the default merge style for a single update.
Update with rebase	Fetches upstream changes and rebases local Weblate commits on top of upstream.	Keep history linear when that matches your workflow.
Update with merge without fast-forward	Fetches upstream changes and creates an explicit merge commit even when a fast-forward would be possible.	Preserve merge commits for auditing or branch-management reasons.
Lock / Unlock	Prevents or allows translators to make further changes in Weblate.	Freeze translation changes while doing repository maintenance outside Weblate.
Reset and discard	Resets Weblate’s local repository to upstream and discards pending Weblate changes.	Use when upstream should overwrite the local Weblate repository state.
Reset and reapply	Resets Weblate’s local repository to upstream while preserving pending translations. See Reset and reapply recovery behavior.	Recover from diverged history while keeping pending Weblate translations.
Cleanup	Removes untracked files and stale branches from the local repository checkout.	Clean up leftover files or stale repository state in Weblate’s checkout.
Synchronize	Forces Weblate to write all known translations back to the repository files.	Repair cases where repository files became out of sync with the database state.
Rescan	Re-reads translation files from the local repository into Weblate.	Import file changes after manual repository work or file creation.

Reset and reapply recovery behavior

The Reset and reapply operation keeps pending translations from Weblate while resetting the local repository state to match upstream.

The operation can restore pending translations only when the target language files still exist after the reset or when Weblate can create them for the component, for example using a valid Template for new translations.

If neither of these conditions is met, Weblate keeps the pending changes in its database and reports a recovery error instead of failing later with a generic parse error.

Avoiding merge conflicts by focusing on Git operations

Even when Weblate is the single source of the changes in the translation files, conflicts can appear when using Squash Git commits add-on, Merge style is configured to Rebase, or you are squashing commits outside of Weblate (for example, when merging a pull request).

The reason for merge conflicts is different in this case. Weblate can have new local commits after you merge earlier Weblate commits upstream. This typically happens if merging is not automated and changes wait for days or weeks for a human review. Git is then sometimes no longer able to identify upstream changes as matching the Weblate ones and refuses to perform a rebase.

Squash merging Weblate changes makes this harder to recover from. A squash merge creates a new commit instead of preserving the individual Weblate commits in the upstream history. Weblate still has the original commits in its local repository, and Git can no longer prove that upstream already contains them. If the conflict was also resolved manually, the file contents can differ from both repositories, so Weblate can keep failing to update even after the pull request was merged upstream.

If upstream no longer contains Weblate commits because they were squash merged, updating the repository might not be enough. Use Reset and reapply from Repository maintenance to reset Weblate to upstream while keeping pending translations; see Reset and reapply recovery behavior. Use Reset and discard only when upstream should fully replace Weblate’s local changes.

To approach this, you either need to minimize the amount of pending changes in Weblate when you merge a pull request, or avoid the conflicts completely by not squashing changes.

Here are few options how to avoid that:

• Do not use Squash Git commits or squash merging for Weblate changes. Squashing is why Git might no longer recognize the changes after merging.

• When resolving conflicts outside Weblate, merge the Weblate commits with a regular merge commit and push that result upstream. Do not squash merge the conflict-resolution pull request.

• Let Weblate commit pending changes before merging. This will update the pull request with all its changes, and both repositories will be in sync.

• Use the review features in Weblate (see Translation workflows) so that you can automatically merge GitHub pull requests after CI passes.

• Use locking in Weblate to avoid changes while GitHub pull request is in review.

See also

Weblate Client

Code hosting notifications

Provider-specific app and webhook instructions for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Pagure, Azure Repos, Gitea, Forgejo, and Gitee are covered in Code hosting integrations.

Provider-specific notifications

These legacy anchors are kept for compatibility. Current provider-specific app and webhook setup is documented in Code hosting integrations.

See also

• GitHub notifications

• GitLab notifications

• Bitbucket notifications

• Pagure notifications

• Azure Repos notifications

• Gitea notifications

• Forgejo notifications

• Gitee notifications

Automatically updating repositories nightly

Weblate automatically fetches remote repositories nightly to improve performance when merging changes later. You can optionally turn this into doing nightly merges as well, by enabling AUTO_UPDATE.

Pushing changes from Weblate

Each translation component can have a push URL set up (see Repository push URL), and in that case Weblate will be able to push changes to the remote repository. Weblate can also be configured to automatically push changes on every commit, see Push on commit.

For the push options table and provider-specific pull, merge, and review request workflows, see Pushing changes from Weblate.

See also

See Accessing repositories for setting up SSH keys, and Lazy commits for info about when Weblate decides to commit changes.

Protected branches

If you are using Weblate on protected branch, you can configure it to use pull requests and perform actual review on the translations (what might be problematic for languages you do not know). An alternative approach is to waive this limitation for the Weblate push user.

For example on GitHub this can be done in the repository configuration:

Interacting with others

Weblate makes it easy to interact with others using its API.

See also

Weblate’s REST API

Lazy commits

The behaviour of Weblate is to group commits from the same author into one commit if possible. This greatly reduces the number of commits, however you might need to explicitly tell it to do the commits in case you want to get the VCS repository in sync, e.g. for merge (this is by default allowed for the Managers group, see List of privileges).

The changes in this mode are committed once any of the following conditions are fulfilled:

• Somebody else changes an already changed string.

• A merge from upstream occurs.

• An explicit commit is requested.

• A file download is requested.

• Change is older than period defined as Age of changes to commit on Component configuration.

Hint

Commits are created for every component. So in case you have many components you will still see lot of commits. You might utilize Squash Git commits add-on in that case.

If you want to commit changes more frequently and without checking of age, you can schedule a regular task to perform a commit. This can be done using Periodic Tasks in The Django admin interface. First create desired Interval (for example 120 seconds). Then add new periodic task and choose weblate.trans.tasks.commit_pending as Task with {"hours": 0} as Keyword Arguments and desired interval.

Processing repository with scripts

The way to customize how Weblate interacts with the repository is Add-ons. Consult Executing scripts from add-on for info on how to execute external scripts through add-ons.

Keeping translations same across components

Once you have multiple translation components, you might want to ensure that the same strings have same translation. This can be achieved at several levels.

Translation propagation

With Allow translation propagation enabled (what is the default, see Component configuration), all new translations are automatically done in all components with matching strings. Such translations are properly credited to currently translating user in all components.

Propagation preconditions:

• All components have to reside in a single project (linking component is not enough).

• Enable Allow translation propagation to automatically reuse translations for matching strings.

• The translation propagation requires the key to be match for monolingual translation formats, so keep that in mind when creating translation keys.

• The strings are propagated while translating, strings loaded from the repository are not propagated.

Tip

This feature currently has limitations, and we want to make it more universal. Please share your feedback at https://github.com/WeblateOrg/weblate/issues/3166.

Consistency check

The Inconsistent check fires whenever the strings are different. You can utilize this to review such differences manually and choose the right translation.

Automatic translation

Automatic translation based on different components can be way to synchronize the translations across components. You can either trigger it manually (see Automatic translation) or make it run automatically on repository update using add-on (see Automatic translation).