🧵 Moirai

Manage translation strings in real time

• Let your non-developer team members finally manage translations (yes, even Karen from marketing...).
• See those translations live in your app, so you can make sure “Submit” isn’t overlapping the button where “**Do not press this button EVER” should be.
• Automatically create Pull Requests based on these changes, saving your developers from yet another “small tweak” email request.

Let the world be translated, one typo at a time.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "moirai"

And then execute:

bundle

Next, you need to run the generator which will create the necessary files including the database migration, as well as inserting the engine in the routes.rb file, and importing the necessary javascript files:

bin/rails g moirai:install

Then run:

bin/rails db:migrate

Usage

How to change translations

If you mounted Moirai under "/moirai", head there and you will find a list of all the files containing texts that can be translated. Open a file, change the value of translations, and press ENTER to update the translation and see it immediately changed on the application.

Inline editing

By default, inline editing is disabled. To enable it, set the moirai=true query parameter in the URL.

If you want to only allow specific users to perform inline editing, you can override the moirai_edit_enabled? method in your application helper.

module ApplicationHelper
  def moirai_edit_enabled?
    params[:moirai] == "true" && current_user&.admin?
  end
end

You also need to have the moirai_translations_controller.js Stimulus Controller initialized.

Importmap

The command bin/rails g moirai:install should have already pinned the necessary controller for you in importmap.rb, so no further steps are needed.

jsbulding

The command bin/rails g moirai:install should have already copied the necessary controller for you in app/javascripts/controllers, so no further steps are needed.

More?

If you’re unsure about all the possible configuration options, you can simply copy and paste the stimulus controller into your app as a fallback.

Automatic PR creation with Octokit (optional)

If you would like Moirai to automatically create a pull request on GitHub to keep translations synchronized with the codebase, you need to set up Octokit. You will also need to create a Personal Access Token on GitHub, and configure the access in the appropriate * environment variables* (this is explained below).

1. Add Octokit to Your Gemfile

First, add Octokit to your project’s Gemfile:

gem 'octokit'

Then run bundle install.

2. Create a Personal Access Token (PAT) on GitHub

You will need a Personal Access Token (PAT) with the Content - Write permission to allow Octokit to create branches and pull requests.

• Go to GitHub Token Settings.
• Click Generate New Token.
• Give your token a name (e.g., “Moirai”).
• Under Scopes, select:
  • repo (for full control of private repositories, including writing content).
  • content (for read/write access to code, commit statuses, and pull requests).
• Generate the token and copy it immediately as it will be shown only once.

3. Set Up Environment Variables

You need to configure the following environment variables in your application:

• MOIRAI_GITHUB_REPO_NAME: The name of the repository where the pull request will be created.
• MOIRAI_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN: The Personal Access Token (PAT) you created earlier.

For example, in your .env file:

MOIRAI_GITHUB_REPO_NAME=your-organization/your-repo
MOIRAI_GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN=your-generated-token

We also support Rails credentials. The environment variables need to be stored in a slightly different way to adhere to convention. For example:

moirai:
  github_repo_name: your-organization/your-repo
  github_access_token: your-generated-token

4. Triggering the pull request creation

Moirai will now be able to use this Personal Access Token to create a pull request on GitHub when a translation is updated.

To trigger this, you can press the Create or update PR button once you have made your changes.

Authentication

Moirai allows you to use basic HTTP authentication to protect the engine. To enable this, you need to set the following environment variables:

MOIRAI_BASICAUTH_NAME=moirai
MOIRAI_BASICAUTH_PASSWORD=moirai

⚠️ Remember to protect Moirai. You don't want to give everyone the possibility to change strings in the application.

If you have authenticated users, you can leverage the Rails Routes protection mechanism to protect the engine. See the following example:

authenticated :user, lambda { |u| u.role == "admin" } do
  mount Moirai::Engine => '/moirai', as: 'moirai'
end

Development

1. Check out the repo:

   git clone git@github.com:renuo/moirai.git
   cd moirai

2. Run the setup script to install dependencies:

   bin/setup

3. Copy the example environment variables file to create your own .env file:

   cp .env.example .env

4. Set your environment variables using the newly created .env file.

You will need a repository to test against and a token. Generate a new Fine-GRained Personal access token and give the necessary permissions to your repository. See the image below as an example:

5. Run the tests:

   bin/check

6. To view the engine in a dummy app:

   bin/rails s

TODO

• Support for HTML
• Support for interpolation
• Support for count variants
• Better inline editing tool
• Support for fallbacks: it should detect when a fallback string is in use and prevent attempts to override its value.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Copyright

Copyright Renuo AG.