Avoid editing codes when not authorized

[Olyno]

I wanted to use inlang for the first time today in my Svelte kit project, and it modified a lot of code without asking me.

Take, for example, the generation of the following files:

• hooks.server.ts
• app.html
• +layout.server.ts
• /inlang

Most of these modifications simply create empty files, with no explanation of their purpose other than "we need these files, and even if you delete them, we'll recreate them".

Can't we create the installation steps manually instead? Or find an alternative to avoid any file creation without permission.

[felixhaeberle]

@ivanhofer Can you help here?

[ivanhofer]

We will soon have great news for you 👀

[samuelstroschein]

Can you share more? I bet @Olyno is wondering :)

[ivanhofer]

The inlang SDK is designed to do the whole i18n setup for you. To configure an empty SvelteKit project just to render a single translated string requires you to touch 7 files, you need to add boilerplate code in 15 places which result in 70+ lines of code (If you really want, you can achieve it with a bit less code, but then your i18n integration would not scale well). And those lines can be different for e.g. a SPA or a static website. Therefore we would not recommend doing it, but we at least provide the option.

I'm currently working on a refactor that makes it also possible to opt-out of the SDK magic if you really want. The PR should soon be ready to merge.

[Olyno]

Thank you very much for this information!

What I had in mind was internal SDK processing, which means the same amount of code, but invisibly and with minimal integration. We'd just have to add a new Vite plugin, or import the dependency into Svelte kit's hooks.server.ts file, and it'd be done. Yes, I realize that there are many different types of websites (SSR, SPA...) and that we need to be able to adapt to all of them, which is very challenging.

Otherwise, having a system similar to Deno or Astro, where we see what's going to be changed and can accept (or not) those changes.

I have to tell you that seeing my project filled with files and changes all at once really scared me, it looks like malicious dependencies haha.

[ivanhofer]

What I had in mind was internal SDK processing, which means the same amount of code, but invisibly and with minimal integration.

That is exactly what we want to do. You just need to add the vite plugin and done. Your project is setup!

Otherwise, having a system similar to Deno or Astro, where we see what's going to be changed and can accept (or not) those changes.

This would probably not work in our case, because we don't actually write code to disk. We do it in a virtual way to hide the complexity.
But we plan to add a "How does die SDK work?" section to the docs where we describe everything more in detail.

I have to tell you that seeing my project filled with files and changes all at once really scared me, it looks like malicious dependencies haha.

I would also love to get rid of those files. But due to SvelteKits limitation we can't hide everything for now (unless we apply a hacky solution like patching node:fs). The only thing we can do is add a comment why we need to do that.

[ivanhofer]

@Olyno

Most of these modifications simply create empty files, with no explanation of their purpose other than "we need these files, and even if you delete them, we'll recreate them".

Those files are needed to set up i18n in your project. SvelteKit currently does not provide a fuctionality to hide those files, but we are looking for a solution: #647

What would you expect the comment in the files say other than it is a technical requirement?

Can't we create the installation steps manually instead? Or find an alternative to avoid any file creation without permission.

You can already do it manually, but this solution is not documented at the moment. You can dig trough our code base if you really want ;)
As mentioned above, it is complex to set it up manually.

[ivanhofer]

Here is the first draft of the promised documentation page on how to do everything manually: https://inlang.com/documentation/sdk/sveltekit/advanced
Please share your feedback and concerns.

[Olyno]

Awesome documentation, thank you!