Every thing you need to know about Accent

In category: ← Software Development / Localization

About Accent

Open-source, self-hosted, developer-oriented translation tool.

Github stats:

Commits: 566
913
75
Latest commit: Feb 11, 2023

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Languages/Platforms/Technologies:

Elixir

Lincenses:

BSD-3-Clause

More about Accent

The first developer-oriented translation tool
True asynchronous flow between translators and your team.

Demo • Website • GraphiQL

Accent provides a powerful abstraction around the process maintaining translations in a web/native app.

History. Full history control and actions rollback. Who did what, when.
UI. Simple yet powerful UI to enable translator and developer to be productive.
CLI. Command line tool to easily add Accent to your developer flow.
Collaboration. Centralize your discussions around translations.
GraphQL. The API that powers the UI is open and documented. It’s easy to build a plugin/cli/library around Accent.

Section	Description
🚀 Getting started	Quickly setup a working app
🚧 Requirements	Dependencies required to run Accent’ stack
🎛 Mix commands	How to execute mix task with the Twelve-Factor pattern
🏎 Quickstart	Steps to run the project, from API to webapp, with or without Docker
🌳 Environment variables	Required and optional env var used
✅ Tests	How to run the extensive tests suite
🚀 Heroku	Easy deployment setup with Heroku
🌎 Contribute	How to contribute to this repo

🚀 Getting started

Easiest way to run an instance of Accent is by using the offical docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/mirego/accent

The only external dependancy is a PostgreSQL database.
Create a .env file. Example:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://postgres@docker.for.mac.host.internal/accent_development
DUMMY_LOGIN_ENABLED=1

Run the image

$ docker run --env-file .env -p 4000:4000 mirego/accent

This will start the webserver on port 4000, migrate the database to have an up and running Accent instance!

🚧 Requirements

erlang ~> 24.0
elixir ~> 1.13
postgres >= 9.4
node.js >= 16.13
libyaml >= 0.1.7

🎛 Executing mix commands

The app is modeled with the Twelve-Factor App architecture, all configurations are stored in the environment.

When executing mix commands, you should always make sure that the required environment variables are present. You can source, use nv or a custom l33t bash script.

Every following steps assume you have this kind of system.

But Accent can be run with default environment variables if you have a PostgreSQL user named postgres listening on port 5432 on localhost.

Example

With nv you inject the environment keys in the context with:

$ nv .env mix <mix command>

🏎 Quickstart

This is the full development setup. To simply run the app, see the Getting started instructions

If you don’t already have it, install nodejs with brew install nodejs
If you don’t already have it, install elixir with brew install elixir
If you don’t already have it, install libyaml with brew install libyaml
If you don’t already have it, install postgres with brew install postgres or the Docker setup as described below.
Install dependencies with make dependencies
Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server

That’s it! You should now be able to open the app at http://localhost:4000

Makefile

The Makefile should be the main entry for common tasks such as tests, linting, Docker, etc. This simplifies the development process since you don’t have to search for which service provides which command. mix, npm, prettier, docker, stylelint, etc are all used in the Makefile.

Docker

For the production setup, we use Docker to build an OTP release of the app. With docker-compose, you can run the image locally. Here are the steps to have a working app running locally with Docker:

When running the production env, you need to provide a valid GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_ID in the docker-compose.yml file.

Run make build to build the OTP release with Docker
Run make dev-start-postgresql to start an instance of Postgresql. The instance will run on port 5432 with the postgres user. You can change those values in the docker-compose.yml file.
Run make dev-start-application to start the app! The release hook of the release will execute migrations and seeds before starting the webserver on port 4000 (again you can change the settings in docker-compose.yml)

That’s it! You now have a working Accent instance without installing Elixir or Node!

🌳 Environment variables

Accent provides a default value for every required environment variable. This means that with the right PostgreSQL setup, you can just run mix phx.server.

Variable	Default	Description
`DATABASE_URL`	`postgres://localhost/accent_development`	A valid database URL
`PORT`	`4000`	A port to run the app on

Production setup

Variable	Default	Description
`RESTRICTED_PROJECT_CREATOR_EMAIL_DOMAIN`	none	If specified, only authenticated users from this domain name will be able to create new projects.
`FORCE_SSL`	false	If the app should always be served by https (and wss for websocket)
`SENTRY_DSN`	none	The secret Sentry DSN used to collect API runtime errors
`WEBAPP_SENTRY_DSN`	none	The public Sentry DSN used to collect Webapp runtime errors
`CANONICAL_URL`	none	The URL of the app. Used in sent emails and to redirect from external services to the app in the authentication flow.
`STATIC_URL`	none	The URL of the app. Default to the CANONICAL_URL value.
`WEBAPP_SKIP_SUBRESOURCE_INTEGRITY`	none	Remove integrity attributes on link and script tag. Useful when using a proxy that compress resources before serving them.
`DATABASE_SSL`	false	If SSL should be used to connect to the database
`DATABASE_POOL_SIZE`	10	The size of the pool used by the database connection module
`MACHINE_TRANSLATIONS_VAULT_KEY`	DEFAULT_UNSAFE_VAULT_KEY	The secret key that is used to encrypt machine translations services config key

Authentication setup

Various login providers are included in Accent using Ueberauth to abstract services.

Variable	Default	Description
`DUMMY_LOGIN_ENABLED`	none	If specified, the password-less authentication (with only the email) will be available.
`GITHUB_CLIENT_ID`	none
`GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`GITLAB_CLIENT_ID`	none
`GITLAB_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`GITLAB_SITE_URL`	`https://gitlab.com`
`GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_ID`	none
`GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`SLACK_CLIENT_ID`	none
`SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`SLACK_TEAM_ID`	none
`DISCORD_CLIENT_ID`	none
`DISCORD_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`MICROSOFT_CLIENT_ID`	none
`MICROSOFT_CLIENT_SECRET`	none
`MICROSOFT_TENANT_ID`	none

Email setup

If you want to send emails, you’ll have to configure the following environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
`MAILER_FROM`	none	The email address used to send emails.
`SENDGRID_API_KEY`	none	Use SendGrid to send emails
`MANDRILL_API_KEY`	none	Use Mandrill to send emails
`MAILGUN_API_KEY`	none	Use Mailgun to send emails
`SMTP_ADDRESS`	none	Use an SMTP server to send your emails.
`SMTP_API_HEADER`	none	An optional API header that will be added to sent emails.
`SMTP_PORT`	none	The port ex: (25, 465, 587).
`SMTP_PASSWORD`	none	The password for authentification.
`SMTP_USERNAME`	none	The username for authentification.

Metrics and monitoring setup

If you want to track performance of Accent, you can configure NewRelic with the following environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
`NEW_RELIC_APP_NAME`	none	Service APM name
`NEW_RELIC_LICENSE_KEY`	none	License key

Kubernetes helm chart setup

You can setup the project with a helm chart like this one. This project uses a fork by andreymaznyak and not this canonical repository. The specs and values may need to be updated if you use this repo.

✅ Tests

API

Accent provides a default value for every required environment variable. This means that with the right PostgreSQL setup (and a few setup commands), you can just run mix test.

$ npm --prefix webapp run build
$ mix run ./priv/repo/seeds.exs
$ mix test

The full check that runs in the CI environment can be executed with ./priv/scripts/ci-check.sh.

🚀 Deploy on Heroku

An Heroku-compatible app.json makes it easy to deploy the application on Heroku.

Using Heroku CLI

Based on this guide

$> heroku create
Creating app... done, ⬢ peaceful-badlands-85887
https://peaceful-badlands-85887.herokuapp.com/ | https://git.heroku.com/peaceful-badlands-85887.git

$> heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev --app peaceful-badlands-85887
Creating heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev on ⬢ peaceful-badlands-85887... free
Database has been created and is available

$> heroku config:set FORCE_SSL=true DUMMY_LOGIN_ENABLED=true --app peaceful-badlands-85887
Setting FORCE_SSL, DUMMY_LOGIN_ENABLED and restarting ⬢ peaceful-badlands-85887... done

$> heroku container:push web --app peaceful-badlands-85887
=== Building web
Your image has been successfully pushed. You can now release it with the 'container:release' command.

$> heroku container:release web --app peaceful-badlands-85887
Releasing images web to peaceful-badlands-85887... done

🌎 Contribute

Before opening a pull request, please open an issue first.

Once you’ve made your additions and the test suite passes, go ahead and open a PR!

Don’t forget to run the ./priv/scripts/ci-check.sh script to make sure that the CI build will pass :)

License

About Mirego

Mirego is a team of passionate people who believe that work is a place where you can innovate and have fun. We’re a team of talented people who imagine and build beautiful Web and mobile applications. We come together to share ideas and change the world.

We also love open-source software and we try to give back to the community as much as we can.