AnandChowdhary/remix-starter

A Remix starter with intuitive defaults, like support for internationalization and localized URLs. Coming soon: Authentication and authorization, component documentation, and more!

I built this in literally like 30 minutes to try out Remix. The amazing thing is that today, in 2022, Next.js still doesn’t support localized URLs, and it took me a handful of minutes to set this up!

Features

  • 📕 Localized URLs by default
  • 🌎 Dependency-free typed translation
  • …more coming soon!

Localized URLs by default

Instead of going to / and /about, your users will always go to /en-ch/ and /en-ch/about (in this example, the language is “English - Switzerland, or en-ch). This is an SEO and i18n best practice, so you have unique URLs based on the language of your content.

Redirection

Users will automatically by redirected to their language of choice. We parse the Accept-Language header and figure out the best language for the user.

Language selection

Users can manually select their preferred language. We remember this in a cookie.

Language recommendation

If your users have followed a link (say, on a search result) and have reached your site’s version that we don’t think is their preferred language, we show them a recommendation.

Dependency-free typed translation

The app/data/i18n.json contains all your translations. Don’t worry, we never bundle the entire file; not even entire scopes — only the translations you actually use on a page are included, so your pages are always fast. You can generate this file using any i18n pipeline.

First, list the keys you require on a route:

const i18nKeys = [“hello”, “world”] as const;

Then, the loader function will fetch the translations in the current language:

const i18nKeys = [“hello”, “world”] as const;
type I18nKeys = typeof i18nKeys[number];

type LoaderData = {
  i18n: Record<I18nKeys, string>;
  products: { name: string }[];
};

export let loader: LoaderFunction = (args): LoaderData => {
  return {
    i18n: loadTranslations<I18nKeys>(args.params.locale, i18nKeys),
    products: [{ name: “Pants” }, { name: “Jacket” }],
  };
};

Now consume the translations with full type support:

const { products, i18n } = useLoaderData<LoaderData>();

Development

From your terminal:

npm run dev

This starts your app in development mode, rebuilding assets on file changes.

Deployment

First, build your app for production:

npm run build

Then run the app in production mode:

npm start

Now you’ll need to pick a host to deploy it to.

DIY

If you’re familiar with deploying node applications, the built-in Remix app server is production-ready.

Make sure to deploy the output of remix build

  • build/
  • public/build/

Using a Template

When you ran npx create-remix@latest there were a few choices for hosting. You can run that again to create a new project, then copy over your app/ folder to the new project that’s pre-configured for your target server.

cd ..
# create a new project, and pick a pre-configured host
npx create-remix@latest
cd my-new-remix-app
# remove the new project’s app (not the old one!)
rm -rf app
# copy your app over
cp -R ../my-old-remix-app/app app