Easy i18n with language prefix and language-related route in Laravel 4

I have seen a lot of snippets on how to get language prefixing in URL with Laravel 4. The problem is I was not able to find how to actually keep the prefix in the final URL and how to get a custom URL translated into each language.

So I worked on it and hey, it works pretty well !

I. Setting the available languages

In app/config/app.php, simply add a line with your available languages:

'available_locales' => array('de', 'en', 'es', 'fr', 'it')

II. Translating your URL routes

In app/lang/xx, create a file routes.php with your translated routes, and repeat it for each language. For example, in app/lang/fr/routes.php:

<?php

return array(

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Routes
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | The following language lines contain the routes of the website
    |
    */

    'about' => 'a-propos',
    'contact' => 'contact'

);

III. Connecting routes

It's time to connect your routes ! Firstly, we have to extract the language code (if it exists) from the URL, and to tell Laravel the language to be used. Then, we create a route prefixed group with the language, and we create our named routes. Why named ? Because this way, we will be able to retrieve the URL for the route we want with the prefix in the views. Simple !

<?php

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Routes
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here is where you can register all of the routes for an application.
| It's a breeze. Simply tell Laravel the URIs it should respond to
| and give it the Closure to execute when that URI is requested.
|
*/

$locale = Request::segment(1);

if (in_array($locale, Config::get('app.available_locales'))) {
    \App::setLocale($locale);
} else {
    $locale = null;
}

Route::group(array('prefix' => $locale), function()
{

    Route::get(Lang::get('routes.about'), array('as' => 'about', function()
    {
        return View::make('about');
    }));

    Route::get(Lang::get('routes.contact'), array('as' => 'contact', function()
    {
        return View::make('contact');
    }));

});

Here we are ! We can now access /fr/a-propos, or /en/about, and it will just work. Great, huh ?

IV. Setting up the links in the views

We have to setup the links so that if:

• If we're on the french pages, the about link, for example, is /fr/a-propos
• If we're on the english pages, the about link, for example, is /en/about

It is pretty easy since we used named routes. Let's create a link with that in mind, for example app/views/home.blade.php:

<a href="{{ URL::route('about') }}"></a>

V (optionnal, but recommended). One content, One URL

Be careful, having two URL for the same content is bad for SEO. Say your default language is english, then /en/about and /about will be the same. But it's up to you, maybe that is a behaviour you want. Anyway, if you want to avoid this, you can just remove the default language from available_locales in the app config. That is not a problem since the default language is already set in the locale variable.