Last Updated: June 14, 2019
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12.71K
· dhaya

How to get language switching back in Laravel 4

In Laravel 3, we could easily change from a language to another by prefixing the route URL with the language code (for example http://mysite.com/account/info becoming http://mysite.com/fr/account/info).

With Laravel 4, this feature is not available anymore. With that in mind, @jacekd on Github had the idea of adding a code to handle this feature in the App::before filter. I optimized it using Laravel's core methods.

Here are the steps needed to get language switching back in Laravel 4:

  1. add an Array containing the available languages in config/app.php

    'languages' => array('en', 'fr', 'de', 'es'),
  2. add this code to filters.php

    App::before(function($request)
    {
        if ( in_array(Request::segment(1), Config::get('app.languages')) ) {
            Session::put('locale', Request::segment(1));
            return Redirect::to(substr(Request::path(), 3));
        }
        if ( Session::has('locale') ) {
            App::setLocale(Session::get('locale'));
        }
    });

4 Responses
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Thanks for the info. This works well at switching the languages with sessions, but it doesn't keep the language code in the url. Maybe that's your aim, though. I don't know if it's better for SEO this way or with the language code.

over 1 year ago ·

Hi @aardvark2, you're guessing right. This is not perfect for SEO. Why did Laravel remove the useful path prefixing? I don't know. If you want to keep the language prefixing you could do something by tweaking the global before filter and adding a Route prefix, something like this: https://gist.github.com/dhayab/6172253.

over 1 year ago ·

Hello Dhaya,

Nice work here !

Have you any idea on how to "update" the URL helper to make it write the language prefix each time he is used ?

Regards !

over 1 year ago ·

Thanks for this. I made a few improvements so that URL in views are prefixed.
@romainsauvaire, take a look : https://coderwall.com/p/czumyq

over 1 year ago ·