A week ago I attended an online meetup Flutter Berlin x FlutterLDN. One of the topics was Convenient internationalization of Flutter apps by Dominik Roszkowski. I really liked the solutions to l10n problems existing in Flutter that he presented.

But there was this one thing that I didn't like. He showed us one SaaS application as the only piece of software that deals with Flutter's ARB files good enough. This software, of course, is a paid one (with some free plan), but I thought it can't be that. That was the moment when I created a new GitHub repository 🥳

Albert Wolszon 💙

@albert_wolszon

@OrestesGaolin after your talk at @FlutterBerlin I'm about to jump into creating an open-source Localizely solution focused on #Flutter that anyone would be able to self-host for free. Let's see if this project will be a finished one 😂

18:37 PM - 12 May 2020

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Arbify

Arbify is an ARB file localization tool dedicated to Flutter and its intl package. I'm developing it for 8 days straight now and it already works well as an MVP.

Target

My target to what I want Arbify to be is a tool that:

• works well both for individuals as well as teams and companies
• offers a simple access control via user and project roles
• lets you easily export your messages to ARB file
• and most importantly, is free to use! It's open-source and you can self-host it.

I plan to have a Dart extension that will let you easily integrate your Flutter project to any Arbify instance and easily sync your messages with your codebase.

Quick demo

Technology

At the beginning, I was wondering what technology should I choose for this project. I really had three options in my mind:

Dart
The language that the community already knows well so it would probably attract more contributors from the Flutter environment. But that's the technology I didn't know at all in terms of backend development.

PHP: Symfony/Laravel
The technologies that I personally know quite well and I can easily create stuff in.

Eventually, I chose Laravel and, I believe, thanks to that the project is in a very good shape right now!

Repository

cp .env.example .env

docker-compose build arbify
docker-compose up -d

docker-compose run arbify composer install
docker-compose run arbify php artisan key:generate
docker-compose run arbify php artisan migrate
docker-compose run arbify php artisan db:seed
docker-compose run arbify npm install
docker-compose run arbify npm run prod

Additional thoughts

I'm very happy I finally found an idea for a project that a) is a niche on the market b) will truly help people and c) drives me so crazy I'm a little bit frustrated I'm programming instead of procrastinating 😂.

Giving back to the community is an awesome thing. (And looks like they like the idea)

Albert Wolszon 💙

@albert_wolszon

For the last week, I was working on Arbify! An open-source localization tool for #Flutter. Inspired by @OrestesGaolin talk at @FlutterBerlin x @FlutterLDN. You can check it out yourself with Docker github.com/Arbify/Arbify. 🌟 appreciated. Keep in mind it's early alpha!

21:31 PM - 18 May 2020

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