rack-i8n_routes: route translated URLs to their canonical URLs

rack-i18n_routes is a Rack middleware component that internally re-routes URLS that have been translated into untranslated or canonical URL.

If you manage a site that has content many languages and also localized URLs, you will find rack-i18n_routes very useful, especially when used in conjunction with rack-i18n_best_langs.

Differently from other similar Rack middleware components, rack-i18n_routes focuses only on path translation/normalization and does not require Rails or the i18n gem.

Features

The main task of rack-i18n_routes is the normalization of request paths.

Path normalization rewrites the URI (actually the PATH_INFO) so that that the downstream applications will have to deal with the normalized path only, instead of a myriad of localized paths.

The original path is saved in the rack.i18n_routes_orig_PATH_INFO variable.

Examples

rack-i18n_routes works like any other Rack middleware component:

# in your server.ru rackup file
require 'rack/i18n_routes'

aliases = {
    'articles' => {
        'fra' => 'articles',
        'spa' => ['artículos', 'articulos'],

        :children => {
            'the-victory' => {
                'fra' => 'la-victoire',
                'spa' => 'la-victoria',
            },
            'the-block' => {
                'fra' => 'le-bloc',
                'spa' => 'el-bloque',
            },
        },
    },

    'paintings' => {
        'fra' => 'peintures',
        'spa' => 'pinturas',
    }
}

MAPPING_FN = Rack::I18nRoutes::AliasMapping.new(aliases)

use Rack::I18nRoutes, MAPPING_FN
run MyApp

Requests to /articulos/el-bloque, /articles/le-bloc and even /articulos/le-bloc will all be sent to /articles/the-block.

This component deals only with URL normalization. You can use rack-i18n_best_langs (documentation) to automatically associate the translated URLs to their languages.