Laravel Translatable

A fresh new way to handle Model translations, the translations are joined into the Model instead of making you query a relation or get every single attribute's translation one by one.

Installation

Require the package.

composer require koenhoeijmakers/laravel-translatable

... and optionally publish the config.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="KoenHoeijmakers\LaravelTranslatable\TranslatableServiceProvider"

Usage

Setting up a translatable Model.

Start off by creating a migration and a Model, we'll go with the Animal Model and the corresponding AnimalTranslation Model.

Migrations

Schema::create('animals', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->timestamps();
});

Always have a locale and a foreign_key to the original Model, in our case animal_id.

Schema::create('animal_translations', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->unsignedInteger('animal_id');
    $table->string('locale');
    $table->string('name');
    $table->timestamps();
    
    $table->unique(['locale', 'animal_id']);
    $table->foreign('animal_id')->references('id')->on('animals');
});

Models

Register the trait on the Model, and add the columns that should be translated to the $translatable property, But also make them fillable, this is because the saving is handled through events, this way we don't have to change the save method and makes the package more interoperable.

So make sure the $translatable columns are also $fillable on both Models.

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use KoenHoeijmakers\LaravelTranslatable\HasTranslations;

class Animal extends Model
{
    use HasTranslations;
    
    protected $translatable = ['name'];
    
    protected $fillable = ['name'];
}

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class AnimalTranslation extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = ['name'];
}

This is pretty much all there is to it, but you can read more about the package down here.

About

What makes this package so special is the way it handles the translations, how it retrieves them, how it stores them, and how it queries them.

Querying

Due to how the package handles the translations, querying is a piece of cake, while for other packages you would have a ->whereTranslation('nl', 'column', '=', 'foo') method.

But in this package you can just do ->where('column', '=', 'foo') and it'll know what to query, just query how you used to!

Retrieving

When you retrieve a Model from the database, the package will join the translation table with the translation of the current locale config/app.php.

This makes it so that any translated column acts like it is "native" to the Model, due to this we don't have to override a lot of methods on the Model which is a big plus.

Need the Model in a different language? Call $model->translate('nl') and you are done. Now you would like to save the nl translation? just call ->update(). The Model knows in which locale it is loaded and it will handle it accordingly.

$animal = Animal::query()->find(1);

$animal->translate('nl')->update(['name' => 'Aap']);

Storing

You will be storing your translations as if they're attributes on the Model, so this will work like a charm:

Animal::query()->create(['name' => 'Monkey']);

But i hear you, you would like to store multiple translations in one request! In that so you can use the ->storeTranslation() or the ->storeTranslations() method.

$animal = Animal::query()->create(['name' => 'Monkey']);

$animal->storeTranslation('nl', [
    'name' => 'Aap',
]);

$animal->storeTranslations([
    'nl' => [
        'name' => 'Aap',
    ],
    'de' => [
        'name' => 'Affe',
    ],
]);