Fresh installs shouldn't produce i18n warnings

[tmcw]

What version of starlight are you using?

v3.6.4

What is your idea?

I set up a new Astro project, start it up, and right off the bat the output is like:

➜  nebulous-nebula npm run dev

> nebulous-nebula@0.0.1 dev
> astro dev

  🚀  astro  v3.6.4 started in 535ms

  ┃ Local    http://localhost:4322/
  ┃ Network  use --host to expose

01:43:29 PM [content] Watching src/content/ for changes
01:43:30 PM [content] The "i18n" collection does not have an associated folder in your `content` directory. Make sure the folder exists, or check your content config for typos.
01:43:30 PM [content] Types generated
01:43:30 PM [astro] update /.astro/types.d.ts

What is the i18n collection? Why doesn't it have a folder? Should I have created the folder?

The i18n docs aren't very helpful for debugging this. It seems like I'm looking for this doc on translating the UI: https://starlight.astro.build/guides/i18n/

But I'm starting with a monolingual site. I don't have JSON files of alternative translations.

So I create an empty directory in src/content/i18n. And, knowing that Git does not allow empty directories (afaict), touch a .keep file in it:

➜  nebulous-nebula mkdir src/content/i18n
➜  nebulous-nebula touch src/content/i18n/.keep

Seems like it should be a _keep file to follow astro's rules.

Why is this feature necessary?

Showing warnings on fresh installs is not good DX and it seems like this is just a flaw in the template.

Do you have examples of this feature in other projects?

No response

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this feature.

[AutonomousCat]

I just got this warning after trying to get an 11ty theme called Spacebook working, and ultimately gave up after a week because it was too outdated. I was frustrated upon my first Astro (with the Starlight template) installation, thinking "Is everything just broken?" and then Googled the issue, fully ready to try a different static site generator if I found nothing promising.

Frankly, I'm trying out Astro because I'm unfamiliar with a lot of web dev stuff, so I didn't know what i18n is. Thankfully, I'm learning now it's just an empty placeholder for optional locales. This should 100% be fixed, even if it just adds an empty file with a comment that links to https://starlight.astro.build/guides/i18n/.

[delucis]

Thanks for the feedback — definitely something we’re hoping to fix soon. I believe a fix was on its way, but I’ll check in on progress there!

[delucis]

Dug around a bit and decided to try to tackle this in Starlight itself: #1458

[delucis]

Behaviour should be improved in v0.17.3!

If you still have a warning when starting up a project, you can remove the i18n collection from src/content/config.ts:

import { defineCollection } from 'astro:content';
- import { docsSchema, i18nSchema } from '@astrojs/starlight/schema';
+ import { docsSchema } from '@astrojs/starlight/schema';

export const collections = {
	docs: defineCollection({ schema: docsSchema() }),
-	i18n: defineCollection({ type: 'data', schema: i18nSchema() }),
};