Development modes

dev modes

The config dev controls the behavior during development mode and it can be one of the following:

• false: Disabled, nothing done during development
• 'read': Only uses existing translations and doesn’t add newly detected messages
• 'add': Adds newly detected messages and updates their refs as they get referenced, but doesn’t touch existing messages
• 'refs': Adds new messages, updates refs of all messages and marks obsoletes when no longer referenced
• 'clean': Full behavior same as npx wuchale --clean, deletes unused messages

Note

When the dev mode is clean, messages that are deleted are kept in memory as long as the dev server is alive. That way, if an already translated message is deleted and later re-added (happens when experimenting with UI text), there will be no re-translation necessary, it will be written from memory.

Tip

This config can be temporarily changed without restarting the dev server by writing a file in the {localesDir}/.wuchale:

echo '{"dev":false}' > src/locales/.wuchale/confUpdate.json

This can be used to make it play nice with other tools, e.g. git while rebasing, by putting the command in a hook.

HMR support

HMR support is enabled when the dev mode is enabled (not false) and it supports two directions.

Editing source files

The updates are embedded inside the transformed modules themselves. This way, there is no roundtrip for the catalog updates and a single HMR update holds all the info. Then the new version of the file updates the catalog just before it uses it. And this is independent of how you the catalogs are loaded because the source files update the catalog after getting it, just before using it.

This makes it as if wuchale was never there, while it does its job of extracting and keeping the catalogs up to date, even live translating!

Editing catalog storage files

Catalog storage files are not edited as frequently and therefore editing them triggers a full reload instead of small localized updates.